Love Interest: Figures and Fictions of Venture Capital and the Law
in Conquista
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Legnani, Nicole Delia. 2014. Love Interest: Figures and Fictions
of Venture Capital and the Law in Conquista. Doctoral
dissertation, Harvard University.
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Love Interest: Figures and Fictions of Venture Capital and the Law in
Conquista
A dissertation presented
by
Nicole Delia Legnani
to
The Department of Romance Languages
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of
Hispanic Literature
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 2014
© 2014 Nicole Delia Legnani
All rights reserved.
iii
Professor José Rabasa
Nicole Delia Legnani
Love Interest: Figures and Fictions of Venture Capital and the Law
in Conquista
Abstract
Inspired by the visual allegory ("Conquista, embarcáronse a las Indias"
fol. 73 of the Nueva corónica), Legnani contends that the development of the
laws of peoples (jus gentium) by 16th century Spanish jurists should be
analyzed within the corpus of commercial law (lex mercatoria) employed by
sea merchants, bankers and mercenaries throughout the 15th and 16th
centuries. This dissertation explores the movement from figure to fiction in
discourses of capital and violence.
What is Conquista? The first chapter contends that seafaring
enterprises existed without the boundaries of land-based law and operated on
the basis of two exceptions: first, the prohibition against charging interest
(usury) was condoned in partnerships for overseas ventures; second, the
profession of respect for jus gentium gave way before the universal imperative
of free trade and evangelization. Via metalepsis, the practices of venture
capital gained legitimacy in the process of becoming the imperial habitus of
conquista.
iv
How did the metalepsis of venture capital work in the Indies, oftentimes
with catastrophic consequences? The second chapter traces the metalepsis of
“love interest,” i.e. the synonymous use and understanding of caritas and
cupiditas, as developed in the contracts (capitulaciones) signed between
Crown, Church and conquistadors and the laws codified to regulate the
imperial enterprise, based almost entirely on indigenous labor and tribute, and
make it more productive. The requerimiento, Laws of Burgos, 1526
Ordenanzas, Leyes nuevas (1543) and 1573 Ordenanzas, along with
contemporary capitulaciones with Pedrarias Dávila and Francisco Pizarro
receive close readings.
The third chapter analyzes the subordination of caritas to cupiditas in
José de Acosta’s De procuranda indorum salute. Written to assuage the
conscience of the Spanish sovereign, and in dialogue with the specters of
Bartolomé de las Casas, Acosta offers to reform evangelization and empire in
the Indies, by reinforcing the synonymous use of love and interest. Finally, the
metonymic relationship between jus gentium and empire receives full
consideration in the fourth chapter, which analyzes the bid of the curacas,
indigenous elites of the Andes, for incorporation into the Spanish Crown in
1561.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT
iii
DEDICATION
vi
EPIGRAPH
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
viii
INTRODUCTION
1
CHAPTER 1:
23
Contracting Subjects: Venture Capital and Conflicts of Interest
CHAPTER 2:
73
(En)Forcing Love Interest: Contracts and the Law in the Conquista
of America
CHAPTER 3:
128
The Specters of Las Casas in the Political Theology of José de Acosta
CHAPTER 4:
181
Doing the Bidding of Empire: the Curacas Negotiate Dominion
with Philip II
EPILOGUE
233
WORKS CITED
243
vi
A mi hija, Francesca
vii
Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
Che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona
viii
Acknowledgements
Given the subject matter, it is more than fitting that this dissertation
should begin with a list of the people and the institutions to which I, its author,
acknowledge my debt, with little hope of providing adequate reward for all the
emotional, intellectual and material support that I have received throughout
this endeavor.
It was a privilege and an inspiration to work with José Rabasa, whose
ongoing generosity, patience, sense of humor and encouragement never fail to
surprise and guide me. Thank you for challenging me to embrace the questions
as they arose in writing; questions that had to be raised because they have no
easy answers. I am so fortunate to have been on the receiving end of your
mentorship and dedication during your tenure here at Harvard University.
Mary Malcolm Gaylord has been my teacher, mentor and friend since I
was a first year at the College. Your attention to detail, argument and structure
is without parallel. Thank you for your patience and support, and for believing
in the salience of this project from the very beginning. Above all, thank you for
your unflagging belief in me and my scholarship.
Much gratitude is owed to Luis Girón Negrón for his comments on the
theological arguments and corrections, especially to the texts in Latin. Any
errors continue to be my own. Thank you for your ongoing encouragement of
my love for translation, medieval culture and texts, and my interdisciplinary
interests. I have been able to count on your support for over a decade!
ix
Luis Cárcamo Huechante, many thanks for involving me in your
activism and scholarship over the years and for your insightful comments,
suggestions and steadfast support for my work.
It is difficult to imagine doing what I do today without the influence of
my parents, Augusto and Josefina Legnani. I would also like to thank José
Antonio Mazzotti for recognizing my vocation when I was an undergraduate
and for encouraging and supporting my first foray into colonial studies.
Many thanks are in order to DRCLAS and Romance Languages and
Literatures for their financial support for the research and writing of this
dissertation.
To Christopher M. Morse, many thanks for your friendship and care, for
the soup, dog walking, Ru Paul nights, and (ego) massages; most of all, thank
you for your wholehearted embrace of “unclehood.”
To my sister (in-law), Andrea Gamio Felipa, I could not have done this
without your love, encouragement and sustenance over the past year. Thank
you for being here.
Thanks also to Roger Assezbian, Clio and Mark Bildman, Lotte Buiting,
Ilana Brito, Dick Cavanagh, Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino, Tom Cummins, Luisa
Felipa de Gamio, Pedro Gamio Felipa, Pedro Gamio Martínez, Goretti
González, Verónica González, V. Judson Harward, Bob Higgins, Obed Lira,
Salomón Lerner Febres, Melissa Machit, Giuseppe Mazzotta, María Rosa
Menocal (que en paz y amor descanses), Afsaneh Najmabadi, María Ospina,
Peter Pine, Jean Ryoo, Frank Salomon, Angélica Serna, Lois Stanley, Sarah
x
Winifred Searle, Mary and Steven Swig, Jorge Téllez Vargas, and Emily
Westfal.
Finally, this project would not have come to fruition without Fernando
Gamio Felipa. Thank you for playing your various roles as husband, friend,
advocate and first reader over the years; for our beautiful, intelligent and sassy
daughter; for your books; for loving me fiercely, and unequivocally. Though as
spouses we have parted ways, you and I remain best friends and family. For
this I remain forever grateful.
Yours,
-N.D.L.
Introduction
iI
1
Fig. 1 . Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, “Conquista: Embarcáronse a las Indias” fol.
73, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), A Digital Research Center of
the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark
2
Une figure est (déjà) une petite fiction, en ce
double sens qu’elle tient généralement en
peu de mots, voire en un seul, et que son
caractère fictionnel est en quelque sort
atténue para l’éxiguïté de son véhicule et,
souvent, par la fréquence de son emploi, qui
empêchent de percevoir la hardiesse de son
motif sémantique: seuls l’usage et la
convention nous font accepter comme
banale une métaphore comme “déclarer sa
flamme”, une métonymie comme “boire un
verre,” ou une hyperbole comme “morte de
rire”. La figure est un embryon, ou, si l’on
prèfère, un esquisse de fiction.1
Gérard Genette, Métalepse : De la figure à la
fiction
Conquista. Embarcáronse a las Indias. (Conquest. They set sail for the
Indies.) Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, a Christian Yarivilca of Huamanga in
the Viceroyalty of Perú, wrote his Nueva Corónica and Buen Gobierno (1615)
for Philip III of Spain (r. 1598-1621). The manuscript, held at the Royal Library
of Denmark in Copenhagen, narrates the times of the Pre-Inca, the Inca, the
Spanish Conquest and the Colony, and prescribes remedies for the ills and
injustices of the Spanish empire. There is a logical leap in the title between the
“new chronicle” of the past and his prescriptions for good government. The
future, at least one of “good government,” depends on a “new” presentation of
past events. It is but one instance of the figure of metalepsis, broadly
1
“A figure is (already) a little fiction, in the double sense that it usually takes but a few
words, or even one, and its fictional character is mitigated by the smallness of its
vehicle and, often, by the frequency of its use, which prevents the perception of the
audacity of its semantic pattern: only use and convention make us accept as
commonplace a metaphor such as ‘declare his flame (love),’ a metonymy such as
‘drink a glass,’ or hyperbole such as ‘die of laughter.’ The figure is an embryo, or, if
one prefers, a sketch of fiction” (translation mine 17).
3
understood, ever since Aristotle defined it in his Poetics as the employment of
one word for another, in a transference of meaning that comprised the use of
figurative language, especially synonymy, metonymy and metaphor. This
dissertation explores the movement from figure to fiction in discourses of
capital and violence and argues that it cannot be reduced to any one figure;
conquista casts a wide net, and its constructedness, the fact of its artifice, does
not make its effects on the lives and livelihood of the indigenous peoples of the
Americas any less visceral.
The one hundred and forty ninth drawing of the Nueva corónica,
Conquista. Embarcáronse a las Indias belongs to the section that acts as a
hinge between Pre and Post Contact with the Spanish conquistadors, and,
thus, indirectly, with the Sovereigns of Spain. Guamán Poma goes to great
lengths to separate the times of the (first) contact with Christianity from that
first contact with Spaniards. The conquista, Guamán Poma contends in his
letter and manual to the Spanish sovereign, was a business venture and, thus,
an act of apostasy; cupiditas, suggests Guamán Poma, cannot be a figure for
caritas. At the same time, Guamán Poma famously declared, no hubo
conquista “there was no conquest.”
Is Conquista a non-existent event, to recall the term as used by Badiou?
A fundamental rupture that reveals a “truth,” which can now be named and
unnamed?2 If so, how shall it be named? By whom? When is this event? What
2
Badiou introduces the event and the evental, his translator’s neologism, first in
Being and Event and later the Logic of Worlds.
4
is it called? Guamán Poma de Ayala will both use the term, Conquista, to name
the event and deny its existence. “No hubo conquista,” he will assert just as
strongly in his written narrative as he will write and demonstrate in his
depiction: “Conquista. Enbárcaronse a las Indias.” Do the assertion and
negation exist in contradiction within the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno?
Can this assertion and negation serve to elucidate the most basic, but fraught,
of questions: What is a conquista?
Is “enbarcáronse a las Indias,” (they set sail for the Indies), employed as
a definition of conquista? Does this scene, narrated in the preterite tense,
serve as a synonym? If so, is conquista coterminous with seafaring? With a
space which, by definition, exists beyond the demarcations of land that are at
the root of the law? In the first chapter I argue that seafaring enterprises,
under various names, existed without the boundaries of land-based law and
operated on the basis of two exceptions: first, the prohibition against charging
interest (usury) fell to the wayside of the financial partnership for overseas
ventures; second, the profession of respect for local laws and customs (jus
gentium) gave way before the universal imperative of free trade and
evangelization.3 However, the articulation of jus gentium only makes sense
within an imperial context, i.e. the distinction of “local” norms from a
“supralocal” context, such as the Roman Empire, whose laws and practices of
conquest bequeathed posterity with the terminology, laws of peoples. This
3
Arendt argues that Kant’s (in)famous essay “On the Perpetual Peace” is ironic. A
tropological reading of “On the Perpetual Peace,” which found a preponderance of
irony, following Arendt, might, in turn, align Kant’s text with satire, following Frye.
5
metonymic relationship between jus gentium and empire receives full
consideration in the fourth chapter, which examines the bid of the curacas,
indigenous elites of the Andes, for incorporation into the Spanish Crown in
1561.
As Genette has contended, in his productive use of this term for
narratology, metalepsis denotes a figural relation between producer and
production (13). The obvious example of a metaleptic relationship in the
context of conquista would be conquista and conquistador. Indeed, the entire
genre of the relaciones, first person narratives of past actions addressed to the
Sovereign in order to receive benefits in recognition of these acts, could have
provided much grist for Genette’s mill. Yet conquista was not solely the
production of the conquistadores; confessionals redacted in the mid sixteenth
century made the corporate enterprise of conquista abundantly clear and the
ramifications of sin and doubt could touch anyone who had profited from the
Indians’ losses.
As a capitalist enterprise, conquista’s capacity to involve all members of
colonial and peninsular societies was unprecedented. The reach of conquista,
and its multiplying effect, i.e. the excedent of conquistas funding more
conquistas, projects the trope of traductio (imperii: studii) or metaphor, on
the basis of similitude (ex. las dos Españas, Santiago Matamoros and
Santiago mataindios) while depending on a metonymic function (contiguity).
Today, mimesis in business is termed scalability, and understood as the ability
to grow and replicate on the basis of similitude (metaphor) but with capital
6
originating, but disssociated from, the first enterprise in a contiguous form
(metonymy).4
Our discussion of Conquista, following Guamán Poma, must begin by
recognizing that Conquista did not constitute the starting point of his
narrative or story. Indeed, the confessional mode of narrative elicited by
conquista insists on the telling of life before the Conquista as a way of
extirpating that past. Having worked for Martín de Murúa and Cristóbal de
Albornoz in their extirpation campaigns in Huamanga during the second half
of the sixteenth century, Guamán Poma would have been highly conversant in
this form of narrative.5 Refusing to begin his telling of himself, his people, and
his land with the Conquista, he readily concedes that were it not for Conquista,
he would not be addressing a letter to the Spanish Sovereign.
At the same time, it would be difficult to understand the relationship
between his manual for reform with his chronicling of past and contemporary
events without the transformative and destructive fact, recalling Hayden
White’s phrasing, of the Conquista. But for Conquista, there would be no need
for the buen gobierno section. But for the chronicling of the past and how the
Indians of Peru came to know God, the remedies sought in buen gobierno
would have no overall relevance to the narrative. In fiction, Genette has
4
For the tropes used by Marx in the “Forms of Value” in Capital, and how these
tropes structure the events, via cause and effect, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, see White’s Metahistory (320-7). Marx’s use of metalepsis and White’s
analysis of his discourse exemplify scalability both in historical and historiographic
discourses. See also White’s rebuttal of tropology’s critics in Figural Realism (17-20).
5 This narrative form, elicited by the confessional, may very well be the dominant
mode of indigenous narratives of conquista. See Rabasa’s Tell me the Story of How I
Conquered You.
7
described this narrative confusion between causes for effects, and effects for
causes, as a narrative transposition of the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter
hoc (after this, therefore because of this). Yet by Genette’s own admission, this
fallacy in narrative produces powerful fictions.
How do these tropes order narratives meant to earn something tangible
in the real world? How did the metalepsis of venture capital work in the Indies,
oftentimes with catastrophic consequences? Conquista as metalepsis
insinuates itself into the power mechanisms of dominion, coterminous with
discovery of the commonplace (inventio); it functions along the paradigmatic
axis of utterance, but also of silence (of what is glossed over), until its tropes
have become so ingrained so as to have become habitus, what Bourdieu has
defined as “embodied history, internalized as second nature and so forgotten
as history; [it] is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the
product” (In Other Words 56).6 And yet conquista functions on the metaleptic
6 In
The Civilizing Process, Elias refers to the habitus—hexis (state) for the Greeks—of
European polite society as a “second nature” that is the product of a transformation,
over the longue durée of modernity and increasing thresholds of shame and
repugnance, of all forms of comportment. While Elias implicitly accepts the
“constructedness” of habitus, Bourdieu’s use of the term explicitly refers to the artifice
that is, nevertheless, experienced as “second nature.” My own concern for the
metaleptic habitus of venture capital, however, does not eschew the possibility of
subjectivity, a view suggested by Bourdieu in his reflection on the sources of historical
action:
The source of historical action, that of the artist, the scientist, or the
member of government just as much as that of the worker or the petty
civil servant, is not an active subject confronting society as if that
society were an object constituted externally. The source resides
neither in consciousness nor in things but in the relationship between
two stages of the social, that is, between the history objectified in
things, in the form of institutions, and in the history incarnated in
8
processes of venture capital; this dissertation aims to bear witness to the
imperial habitus, in the process of becoming. The metaleptic habitus of
venture capital is exposed and analyzed in chapters one and two, though I will
refer to this concept throughout the dissertation. Thus, I part ways with earlier
scholars of the conquista in ordering my own narrative: venture capital in the
first chapter, the laws of the conquest in the second. The success of conquista’s
metalepsis can be measured in large part by the preference given to the
legislation of the conquest, and juridical categories, for its periodization in the
scholarship of the conquista.
Venture capital has been highly successful in merging caritas and
cupiditas so that they would be used synonymously.7 This was quite a feat,
considering that in becoming embodied, so as to be “second nature,” the
metalepsis of venture capital had to override the ingrained trope of capital
breeding capital as an unnatural occurrence. While the tools at my disposal
allow me to focus mainly on the edifice of discourse surrounding the
conquista, the implications of the conquista metalepsis were felt, suffered,
believed in, performed. The constructedness of conquista makes it no less true
than those other truths revealed by past events.
bodies, in the form of that system of enduring dispositions which I call
habitus. (190)
My conjunction of the two terms brings the question of subjectivity to the fore without
resolving it. Clearly, as a figure, metalepsis insinuates a relation between the producer
and the production, though its truth proposition is not so much represented as
performed.
7 For the commonplace on the evils of cupiditas see 1 Timothy 6: 10. See also
Augustine, in De doctrina christiana, for the classic contrast between caritas and
cupiditas (3.10.16).
9
Addressed to Philip III, Guamán Poma’s narrative of conquista recalls
an earlier habitus, when the metalepsis of love interest had not become second
nature. His narrative offers both a response and a twist on European
interpellation in his graphic and written representations of “discovery,”
descubrimiento, that are used synonymously with invención and conquista.8
The metaleptic habitus of conquistadors manifests itself in the naming of
places that already have names, given to them by their native inhabitants.
These Adanic speech acts by the conquistadores perform the material and
symbolic violence that is a common denominator in all three of the ceremonies
of possession, by the Spanish, French and British empires, as argued by Seed.
According to Guamán Poma, the true discovery of the Tahuantinsuyu—
the world circumscribed by Andean thought and experience—occurred during
the first evangelization, or the reign of Inca Sinchi Roca, by one Saint
Bartholomew, one of Christ’s apostles who “salió a esta tierra y volvió” ‘came
to this land and returned.’ In Bartholomew’s original mission, only Cuzco and
Collao received Christ’s good news in the first wave of global evangelization
(followed, perhaps, by apostasy). Finally, Guamán Poma produces an
etymology of “Indios” that contradicts the history of errors in the epithet (the
8
Hernán Pérez de Oliva recurs to the rhetorical trope of the inventio (from invenire)
as a term synonymous with discovery, but a “discovery” that, at least in the rhetorical
convention, refers to locating the commonplace, i.e. the trope, for the construction of
a discourse that will be more intelligible to the speaker’s interlocutor. See Rabasa’s
discussion of Hernan Pérez de Oliva’s Historia de la invención de las Yndias (c.
1528) as a counterpoint to O’Gorman’s use of the term in La invención de América
(Inventing America 3-4). O’Gorman famously argued that the idea of the discovery of
America was an invention. The metaleptic use of invention for discovery with
reference to the rhetorical tradition complicates the thrust of O’Gorman’s argument.
10
confusion of an entire continent and its various peoples as “Indian”) which
uplifts Andean topography and its peoples to the heavens. India, according to
Guamán Poma, comes from tierra en el día (land, earth or even world in
daylight) and this is why the natives of that part of the world are called
“indios.” Rather than an erroneous name, indios is the perfect name for a
people who are more godly (in-dios, in God) than the Spanish.
Guamán Poma insists on an etymology for Indio based on similitude
and contiguity. Call us Indians, Guamán Poma demands, because we are
closer to God. The indios, by Guamán Poma, approach God as embodimients,
in metonymy and in metaphor, of their proximity to God.9 To rephrase
Raymond Carver’s beloved book, what we talk about when we talk about
conquista in the Indies involves the tropes, often the same ones, used both to
envision the experience of conquista and to make truth statements about what
conquista was.
So, what was it? When Guamán Poma reproduces the encounter
between conquistador and Inca in Cuzco, he reproduces the exchange in a
diglossic dialogue (Fig. 2). The Inca asks his ‘Spanish’ guest in Quechua: “Kay
quritachu mikunki?” (Do you [second person sing.] eat this gold?) and Candía
9 Following Frye, we might even expect indios to protagonize in tragic or romance
narratives. In accordance with De Man, an allegorical reading of Guamán Poma
might trace the metonymic spiral of allegory back to Plato’s Symposium. In the
Symposium several experiences share the same metalepsis of receiving a piercing
wound, like that made by an arrow: listening to an ironic witticism wielded by
Socrates, and then trying to interpret his meaning; or experiencing eros, secondhand,
according to Socrates. The piercing wound embodies both a process for unpacking
meaning from a trope (ex. Socratic irony) and the process of experiencing the passion
of eros in the body for the first time, in the form of a trope.
11
responds “este oro comemos” (we eat this gold). Here there is a native
interpellation of the conquistador and an answer, given in Spanish, that
reflects the emphasis on confession in extirpations of idolatry.
True conversion, following Augustine, and the Dominican order’s
practice and theory of conversion in the Americas, is only possible once you
deny your past and make it past (what O’Gorman called a process of “selfannihilation”). Is there not something similar at play? The Inca’s question “Do
you [second person singular] eat this gold?” elicits a response in Candía that
reflects back on the Spanish as a people: “Yes, we eat this gold.” The
individual’s confession is not only damning to himself but to his entire people,
a form of “ethno-suicide”; the Spanish confession re-invents the cannibal of
Columbus beneath the authorial gaze of an Indian Christian; eating a
Eucharist of gold, the conquistador confesses to idolatry but does not ask for
repentance.
The scene of dialogue between Candía and Guayna Capac recalls the
intimacy of Spain’s preferred mode of profit in the Indies: tribute, which
depended on contact with the indigenous. The Spanish preference for labor, as
Seed contends, performed similar encounters to that of Candía and Guayna
Capac with the requerimiento, which is discussed at great length in chapter
two and is one of the best examples of the metaleptic habitus of venture
capital. Of the experience of reading the requerimiento, Las Casas wrote that
he did not know whether to laugh or to weep.
12
Pursuit of native labor and tribute necessarily invoked an intimacy with
the other that the empire would subjugate. But its civilizing and evangelizing
mission made the Empire’s would-be sources of usufruct brothers in Christ.
For Las Casas, such a contradiction was irreconcilable. But the discursive
apparatus created by the metalepsis of love interest built a formidable edifice.
It is little wonder, then, that the Spanish metropoli exploded in discursive
productions that struggled with aspects of conquista (see Gaylord).
This cultural enterprise was not so much a struggle for justice, or a
polemic, but a dubium about the nature of each action taken, or not, in a
corporate venture with conflicting goals. José de Acosta’s treatise to assuage
the conscience of the Spanish sovereign, with a program to reform
evangelization and empire in the Indies, receives our critical attention in the
third chapter precisely because this Jesuit author embraces cupiditas as a
model for caritas without reservation. Yet Acosta finds himself making his
case to Philip II following decades of missionary work in Peru, and the heresy
trial of a renowned Dominican friar, Francisco de la Cruz, whose prophecies
offer another, heterodox vision of Christian empire in response to the
metaleptic habitus of love interest, as practiced in the Andes. Acosta’s
metaleptic feats in reconciling the irreconcilable reflect the other side of
Christian political theology. De la Cruz’s heresy concludes the fourth chapter
on the various offers and counter-offers for reform and autonomy circulating
between the Andes and the Viceroyalty of Peru in the 1560s.
13
Are the figures invoked by madness, heresy or apostasy all that
different? Though his inquisitors qualified them via the binary, heresies or
madness, the reforms put forward by Francisco de La Cruz (d. 1578), who had
taught theology in the University of San Marcos, attempted to lend coherence
to the discourse and practice of evangelization and empire in Peru. For all of
Acosta’s assurances on the providential nature of the imperial enterprise, he
too would grapple with the metalepsis of conquista. Decades after Las Casas
had declared that the destruction in the Indies was irredeemable, and the
Spanish sovereign could no longer pretend to be doing God’s work in the
Indies, Acosta would claim to have found a solution: mimesis of the
merchants’ ethos would provide greater spiritual rewards for the whole
empire. In effect, doubling down on the metalepsis of venture capital would be
the best reform. Yet the doubts formulated in Spain by Las Casas about the
conscience and the salvation of his compatriots haunted Acosta and structured
his own manual for reform. A treatise in name, De procuranda indorum salute
dialogues with the specter of the Dominican friar who, Acosta reiterates, shall
not be named.
Guamán Poma’ narrative of conquista makes an appeal to the Spanish
Sovereign’s conscience. In the Nueva corónica, Candía’s return to Spain sets
off a rumor of gold and cupidity, which in turn produces dreams, quasinightmares, and “alborotos” (a great commotion, riots). Guamán Poma
narrates a re-volution in Peninsular consciousness, an overhaul of time and
14
space and collective wills. He presents the events of the recent past in Spain
with the Andean trope of pachakuti, a cataclysmic renewal of time and space.10
In other words, the conquista in the Indies brought about a pachakuti in the
land of Castille. Significantly, Guamán Poma never returns to the providential
arc of the original mission, St. Bartholomew’s apostolic endeavor; instead of
providence, these new voyages were fueled by the unruliness of adventurers
and idolatrers.
“Conquista: Enbarcáronse a las Indias” (Conquest: They set sail for the
Indies) offers an “allegorical abbreviation” of the many ventures that are
commonly referred to as The Spanish Conquest (Adorno Guamán Poma 1245). Columbus, Juan Díaz de Solís, Almagro, Vasco Núñez de Balboa and
Martín Fernández de Enciso are all on the same boat. A similar drawing,
“Pontifical Flota de Colón” ‘The Pontifical Fleet of Columbus’ offers an almost
identical allegory to Guamán Poma’s depiction of Conquista (eighteenth
drawing in the Nueva corónica). The inclusion of Fernández de Enciso in
Conquista emphasizes the author’s apologetics for empire as the tailwind for
this corporate enterprise.
At first sight, Guamán Poma’s depiction of “Conquista” can be
disconcerting because he represents on one plane the various expeditions,
lands and seas “discovered” by the voyages of conquest during the first half of
the sixteenth century. An annotation at the margin of the drawing underscores
10
For the experience of pachakuti as messianism in the 1550s and 60s, see
MacCormack ‘s “Pachacuti.”
15
his abbreviating and totalizing vision and elucidates for his readers (or his
royal interlocutor) that they are, indeed, engaging with an allegory. Recalling
Quintilian’s classic definition of allegory, the force of this trope (and its ironic
implications) resides precisely in its literal readings. So, these conquistadors
are, indeed, all in the same boat. Beneath the waves another note specifies the
location—“Mar del sur, setecientas leguas del Río de la Plata”—which imagines
not only Transatlantic crossings but transcontinental crossings as well. In this
continent, circumscribed by the voyages of these six men, Saint Bartholomew
is neither a figura or a pre-figura—recalling Auerbach’s paradigm for the
representation of reality in Western literature—of Christianity.
Conquista serves Greed and not the Gospel unless the God of the
Spanish is Gold and Silver (the logical conclusion sustained by Guamán
Poma’s narrative). In every sense, it is a commonplace, but the abbreviation of
time (seventy years) and place (these six men on the same boat) inverts
providence on its head. Rather than mimetic correspondance, Guamán Poma
suggests reciprocal upheavals, reiterated conquistas and pachakutis in what
was known as the Two Spains under the Habsburgs. The metalepsis of
conquista in Guamán Poma’s narrative blurs the Manichean divide of
colonialist discourse while reproducing the topos of sailboat as metonymy of
desire.
Where does empire operate? Guamán Poma’s narrative of the upheaval
caused in the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula when they received the
(good) news of Peruvian gold, resonates with Anne McClintock’s assertion for
16
Victorian England that “imperialism is not something that happened
elsewhere” (7). According to Guamán Poma, the Spanish were completely
transformed by the rumors of gold; they could not eat or drink or sleep as
their thoughts were consumed with lust for the riches across the Atlantic.
These symptoms, not coincidentally, are those associated with “love sickness,”
as the lover is consumed by thoughts of his beloved whom, oftentimes, he has
never even seen. Yet Guamán Poma is describing a collective awakening of
appetites and purpose, a change in consciousness so drastic so as to galvanize
the mobilization of life and capital in pursuit of great wealth beyond the
horizon.
The conquistadors as Gold Eaters both takes Spanish cupidity to task as
an unnatural appetite but also parodies Spanish visions of indigenous
monstrosity in the form of Columbus’s foundational cannibals. In effect,
Guamán Poma’s narrative of the genesis of the Gold Eaters offers not only a
chastening rebuke to his royal interlocutor but also an opportunity to gain selfknowledge through the proverbial looking glass: you and your world have not
been the same since your encounter with us. Moreover, his scathing
representation of Spanish cupidity mines the edifice of love interest in favor of
scholasticism’s condemnation of usury and cupidity, while reviving the
tensions between heterogeneity and homogeneity in questions surrounding
language, the Eucharist, world dwelling and money.11
11
Le Goff’s contention that the development of purgatory in the 13th century and the
Church’s increasing use of accounting metaphors for its management of penance
17
If narratives of Conquista show the strains of metalepsis so, too, does
the leyenda negra. Though this dissertation deals in, trades with, figures of
speech, specters and the mala fama of the enterprises in profitable violence
known as conquista, it does not engage in an economy of conquista, conquête
or conquest. Decades after the death of Las Casas, Acosta cannot even utter
his name when lamenting the pernicious effects that the friar’s accusations had
done for Spain’s fama, its moral standing among nations. Centuries later,
scholars who contend with the legacy of his figure as advocate and intellectual,
as the father of liberation and Indian theology, may find themselves accused of
perpetrating the black legend which, so the story goes, originated with the
incendiary publication of the Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las
Indias (1552) for the purposes of Protestant propaganda in the European Wars
of Religion.
The use and abuse of Las Casas’s text for Protestant propaganda
purposes has been well documented. It is no coincidence that Thomas de Bry
published both Thomas Hariot’s Report of the New found land of Virginia
(1588) as well as the translation into English and his illustrations of Bartolomé
de las Casas’s Brevísima in 1598, soon after a trip to England and in close
nicely dovetails with my inquiry into the effects of Post-Tridentine Catholicism and
the implementation of what I call “love interest” in the 1560s. Le Goff’s dismissal of
the Jewish community’s identification with usury in the European imaginary is highly
problematic, however. See Money, Language and Thought by Marc Shell for a more
nuanced approach to the configuration of credit, ethnic identity and usury, especially
in his reading of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
18
collaboration with Richard Hakluyt. This is but one example of how the
pamphlet that Las Casas had published in 1552 to move the conscience of his
Sovereign in Spain was translated by his contemporaries into Latin and the
modern European languages in an effort to galvanize Protestants against
Catholics in the Wars of Religion. The competition among empires was fierce
and waged in the court of public opinion.
Yet the Spanish empire’s fiercest critics would also learn from its
methods. Two colleagues of Hakluyt, John Frampton and Henry Bynneman,
had translated and published the Suma de geografía (1519) by Martín
Fernández de Enciso, who was one of Spanish empire’s most ardent apologists,
in 1578. Frampton’s’s translation of Enciso’s Suma is hardly a condemnation
of Spanish empire. To the contrary, the translation comments on examples
from the Suma as best practices for the English to follow in their encounters
with American natives in their own colonies. Francis Bacon never failed to
disparage the moral health of Spanish empire while admiring its methods. To
borrow Samuel Huntington’s concept, the black legend was born from a “clash
of civilizations.”
Carga con tus propios muertos. So the saying goes. How and when did
we decide which of the dead were “ours”? It does not follow that the
accusations leveled by Father Las Casas against the practice of Spanish
conquista as a whole are invalid because they were used as propaganda against
Spain and Catholics. However, the use of Spain’s past against speakers of
Spanish is a cause for concern. The black legend not only refers to the
19
allegations of Spain’s unique violence against the indigenous inhabitants of its
empire in the West Indies, but the invocation of said violence in conjunction
with portrayals of the backwardness of Hispanic culture and its speakers.
Coined at the turn of the twentieth century in Spain, black legend makes a
claim to the existence of a trope underlying (mainly) English characterizations
of the value of Spanish civilization. The existence of the trope is incontestable.
The context of its genesis, after Spain’s losses in 1898, belongs to the loss of
empire and the introspection, and, dare I say, melancholy, that followed.
Much like conquista, discussions of the black legend involve their own
metalepsis in narrative. Moreover, scholars in the Hispanic tradition have
developed their own habitus, self-reflexive all the same, for justifying their
discussion of violence in the conquista.12 My claims are quite simple. The
items in contracts signed between the Spanish Crown and the conquistadors
that require the latter to show great love toward the natives cannot be
emphasized at the expense of other items: which natives will be enslaved or
12
Thus, Powell and Himmerich’s Tree of Hate traces the origin of ‘Hispanophobia’ in
the United States to the dissemination of Protestant propaganda beginning in the late
16th century. See Rabasa’s discussion of Hispanic American scholars and their
revisionist readings of the Black Legend and the De Brys’ engravings in Writing
Violence (Chapters 1 and 6). The articles collected by Greer, Mignolo and Quilligan in
Rereading the Black Legend offer explorations of different modes of imperial violence
in relation to racism in the 16th and 17th centuries. Contributions in Parts II and III
are especially relevant to the conjunction of discourses surrounding lex mercatoria
and jus gentium. In his book on British colonialism, Cañizares-Esguera uses the
metalepsis of Puritan Conquistadors, in order to argue for a (moral) equivalence
between Puritan and Huguenot colonizers and their Spanish counterparts. The
Puritans, according to Cañizares-Esguerra, were just as intent in routing the devil,
and extirpating idolatry in their colonies as their Spanish counterparts, the
conquistadors, further south.
20
not; which native customs will be respected or not; how much each investor
will receive per ship outfitted, etc. My own interest is to question how all these
items, the lists in the contracts, the articles in laws, gained narrative cohesion
and reconciliation in the metalepsis of conquista. I do not aspire to finger
pointing, my own J’accuse moment. However, I do comment on how the
native lords of Perú employed the rhetorical figure of deixis, i.e., finger
pointing, when making a bid, in capital, for an autonomous indigenous state
within Christian empire (see chapter four).
Why the fallacies behind conquista remain so compelling, to this day,
have compelled me to write on conquista and its metaleptic habitus. Hence,
my focus on figures and fictions of venture capital in the conquista, not
because they are not true, but because they were constructed, with vital
consequences for the lives and livelihood of millions of peoples.
21
Fig. 2 . Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, “Conquista: Guaina Capac Inga, Candía,
Español” fol. 69, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), A Digital
Research Center of the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark
22
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Chapter One
Contracting Subjects: Venture Capital and Conflicts of Interest
El mucho desorden trahe orden. Refrán con
que se da a entender que los gastos
supérfluous y prodigalidad acarréan pobréza
y miséria: y ella obliga à la moderación y
buen gobierno.
Diccionario de Autoridades (1732)
What’s in a name? The Ordenanzas of 1573 (in)famously proscribed the
use of a word, conquista (conquest), in favor of descubrimiento (discovery) or
pacificación (pacification). Recalling Juliet’s plaintive question, we might ask,
much like Tzevan Todorov in his reading of the Ordenanzas, What’s in a
name? Surely, it is only the word conquest that was banished and not the
activities comprised thereof. Less than a century after the conquista of the
Canary Islands and the so-called New World, the Spanish empire sought to
turn over a new leaf in its scripting of violence for material and spiritual gain.
What’s in a name? And, subsequently, what’s in a name change? What was at
stake? Who were the stakeholders?
According to the authors of the 1573 Ordenanzas, the word conquista
impelled agents to act in ways that contradicted the Crown’s desired
objectives, of a material and spiritual order, for its new subjects in the New
World. The rationale behind Article twenty nine of the Ordenanzas seemingly
argues in favor of a correspondence between the name for violence (conquest,
discovery, and pacification) and the actions performed under its aegis, “pues
24
hauiendose de hazer con tanta paz y caridad como deseamos no queremos que
el nombre dé ocación ni color para que se pueda hazer fuerça ni agrauio a los
Indios” ‘for [as this activity is] to be done with as much peace and charity as we
so desire, we do not wish for the name to give occasion for the use of force or
injury against the Indians.’ The passage offers a striking contrast in subject
positions, between the active “royal we” (deseamos, queremos) and the
impersonal construction for both prescribed and proscribed actions
(haviendose de hazer, se pueda hazer). The law’s circumlocution delineates
yet another island to be discovered, populated by the very people who seem to
be (un)doing the bidding of Empire. Yet empire would gloss over their agency,
while alluding to the wrongs (fuerça, agrauio) committed by its agents, placed
in parentheses by the letter of the law.
In the classical trope on language and civilization, grammar ploughs the
formerly sylvan fields and shares its function with the nomos, the rule of law
that lays claim to an ordering of the world and the right to uphold it by violent
means.1 In 1573, less than one hundred years after Nebrija made his
(in)famous claim that ‘language has always been the handmaiden of empire,’
the laws of Spain would tame unruly subjects by offering a change in
nomenclature. Yet the question remains, was this just smoke and mirrors? A
lexical sleight of hand? If so, who was fooling whom? And why did conquista
1
See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth for his discussion of the violent origins of
the law in the delimitations of land.
25
serve as an excuse for unruly behavior? Why had it become antithetical to the
‘new’ mode of imperial expansion?
At the heart of conquista and its discontents, the question of
subjectivity and agency remains. After all, cynicism aside, the Ordenanzas of
1573 espouse the idea, if not the belief, that removal of a word—conquista—
could change the behavior of the laws’ agents. The laws’ premise for proper
functioning was a top-down hierarchy in which the comportment of an unruly
bunch could be dictated by the law.2 In this imagined scenario, the metropolis
imposed its vision of order on the periphery.3 Yet Empire building had been a
collective endeavor and its ownership was an ongoing matter of contention
and negotiation. While describing the modus operandi of imperial violence in
the Americas, Father José de Acosta (1539-1600) contrasted Spanish imperial
expansion with that of the Portuguese. For Acosta, the system of
remunerating conquistadores for their actions with labor and tribute (i.e., the
encomienda) in the Americas emerged from private enterprise:
Ac prima illa de remunerandis laboribus sumptibusque
militarium hominum, ex necessitate quadam potius quam ex
voluntate, aut religione profecta fuisse videtur. Neque enim
poterat Princeps, aut per quàm aegrè poterat, tantos tot
2
See Bauer for his reading of the Ordenanzas that reinforces their premises for
proper functioning.
3 See Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada for an account of Spanish empire that follows
these parameters. As with Todorov, the Ordenanzas inspired Rama’s vision of
America emerging “Athena-like” from Spain’s utopian vision of Empire. In contrast,
Baber’s account of Tlaxcalan elites negotiating the legal recognition of the city of
Tlaxcala as a city in the early to mid 16th century points to native contributions in the
development of Spain’s imperial bureaucracy. See also Rappaport and Cummins for
indigenous writing “beyond the lettered city” in the Andes.
26
hominum sudores, imo verò etiam cruores dixerim, praemio pari
afficere, nisi in nouo orbe illorum virtute parto, potentiam
quaestumque partiretur. Nam neque isti atioqui contenti essent,
et caeteris similia, audendi, aggrediendique cupiditas omnis
extingueretur. In Lusitanica India, quod Regum Lusitanorum
auspicijs, et auro parta sit, potuit penes Regem totus ille
dominatus sine iusta fuorum querela retineri. Nostrorum verò
hominum, quoniam suapte ductu et re, tanta peregerunt, longè
alia ratio est. Itaque necessitates, vt dixi, cuiusdam fuit, vt suo
quoadam iure, vt olim Israëliticae tribus distributore Iosuë,
terram sortirentur, permanente tamen, quod minimè obscurum
est, supremo omnium penes Regem imperio. (iii.xi. 289-90)
The idea of remuneration for the work and the expenses of the
conquistadores, was born out of necessity rather than out of
desire or religious concern. For the Prince was not able, or only
with greatest difficulty, to give a suitable prize for such “toil and
sweat” (what that really means is “such bloodshed”), save to
divide up amongst them some of the power and the income of the
New World which had been won through their fortitude. They
themselves would not have been satisfied with any other prize
and for the others who followed it would have quenched any
desire to undertake similar ventures. In the Portuguese Indies, as
all was conquered under the auspices and through the gold of
their kings, all the dominion and control was able to be kept in
the monarchy, without any just protest or offense to the
individuals who carried out the task. But in the case of the Indies
of Castile it is a different case altogether, since private enterprise
played the major part. So, as I said, it was out of necessity, as in
other times, like the tribes of Israel for example, where
individuals obtained the land by lot, although as is quite clear,
the supreme control of distribution always remained in the hand
of the king.4 (III.xi. 123)
Acosta’s thoughts on the violent origins of the Spanish Empire and his
program for its reform will receive greater analysis in the third chapter.
Nevertheless, several themes from this passage guide this first chapter’s initial
foray into the structure of capital investment in violence and its corresponding
discourse in the construction of empire: the unique structure of Spanish
4
Unless otherwise stated, the English translations of De procuranda indorum salute
cites the edition and translation of G. Stewart McIntosh.
27
enterprise and empire vis à vis other competitors; the division of power to
remunerate and compensate past investments (both in capital and labor);
violence as “labor”; and the initial and ongoing (relative) poverty of Spanish
Monarchs for undertaking large capital investments.5 Acosta also posits a
capital based theory to explain the Spanish Sovereigns’ relative lack of power
vis à vis their Iberian competitors: power is proportional to the amount of
capital invested by each agent in the scheme. Acosta’s theory of power
distribution will merit further exploration in the section on venture capital in
the 16th century, but for now his observations point to the conflicts in interest
within and among the various partners in the series of ventures known as
conquista.
Conquista underwent lexical renewal and demise in less than a century.
This transformation mirrored the accelerated temporal horizons of venture
capital funds. As Gibson contends, conquista’s entry into the early modern
Castilian lexicon reflected its Latin etymology: the past participle of
conquaestare, signifying the result of an exploration or discovery, often in
lands outside of the Iberian Peninsula. By 1611, Sebastián de Covarrubias
(1539-1613), would make explicit the violence of discovery and exploration in
lands inhabited and ruled by others. In his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o
española (1611), Covarrubias defined conquista as “pretender por armas algún
5
Recall how Cortés, by his own account, when asking Mohtecozoma for gold, justifies
the repeated requests because of “his master’s great need for it” in the Segunda carta
de relación.
28
Reyno, o estado” ‘to feign or expect [to achieve] by force of arms a kingdom, or
state.’ The verb pretender reinforces the metalepsis of foundational violence
“by force of arms”; without the violent reinforcement, the pretensions—
fictions, but fictions that entail expectations—would remain unrealized.
Similarly, the lexicographer’s alludes to “kingdoms” or “states” as the result of
conquista’s violent enactment. The definition thus glosses over the disruption
of orderly, perhaps even civilized societies implicated in conquista’s
pretensions. The figurative leap of the verb pretender suppresses the
transition from violent possession to kingdom or state. In Covarrubia’s muted
allusions to foundational violence (i.e., pretender por armas) can be heard the
faint echoes of Bartolomé de Las Casas’ diatribes against the “dichas
conquistas” or ‘so-called conquests’ in his Brevísima relación de la
destruycion de las indias (1552). When did conquista become “conquista”? In
other words, when did conquista’s utterance become a self-reflexive exercise,
where the speaker felt the need to justify his use of the term?
Conquista’s fortunes, in moral and material terms, were tied to the
particular structure of venture capital funds in the invasion of the Americas.
The term conquista may have grown out of favor by the end of the sixteenth
century, but its mode of operations left a legacy of discourse and narrative that
continue to haunt modernity.6 As many other commentators on the
6
This “haunting” is responsible for other specters that respond to this terrible legacy,
as Derrida explores in his Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt and the New
International (1994).
29
Ordenanzas have observed before me, despite all the rhetoric of novelty and
reform, these laws did not change the methods of empire, a grosso modo, at
the close of the 16th century. Why, then, did conquista continue to be so
grating a term that, for some, was nevertheless so inspiring? Popular wisdom,
as recorded in the Diccionario de Autoridades (1732), may provide a clue to
conquista’s continued salience: “el desorden trae el orden. Refrán con que se
da a entender que los gastos supérfluous y prodigalidad acarréan pobréza y
miséria: y ella obliga à la moderación y buen gobierno” ‘unruliness brings
order. A saying which suggests that superfluous expenses and wastefulness
entail poverty and misery; and this compels moderation and good
government.’ It would seem that order and good government would be
unimaginable without its antithesis, unruliness and excess.
At the same time, empresa, the term commonly associated with
“business” or “enterprise” in contemporary Spanish suffers a transformation,
similar to that of conquista. Empresa had been widely understood as an
“activity with a purpose” or “activity to an end”; knights of romance narratives
made empresas but so did day laborers (Vilar 243). By the close of the
sixteenth century, the acceptance for the use of the term empresa becomes
increasingly circumscribed, limited to the sphere of commerce. Yet commerce
and violence, as Pierre Vilar suggests, could be embodied in the same figure,
“Cristóbal Colón, último gran empresario caballeresco, primer gran
empresario al servicio del capital” “Christopher Columbus, last great knight
30
empresario, first great empresario in capital’s service”(245). How did
empresa and conquista dovetail and then part ways? It seems almost too easy
to signal Columbus as the beginning and the end of eras in capital and
chivalry. Indeed, the definition of empresa by Sebastián de Covarrubias
underscores its emblematic function, created in order to fulfill a particular
end:
Emprender, determinarse a tratar algun negocio arduo y
dificultoso, del verbo Latino apprehendere, porque se le pone
aquel intento en la cabeça, y procura executarlo. Y de alli se dixo
Empresa, el tal cometimiento: y por que los caualleros andantes
acostumbrauan pintar en sus escudos, recamar en sus
sobreuestes, estos designios y sus particulares intentos se
llamaron empresas: y también los Capitanes en sus estandartes
quando yvan a alguna conquista. De manera, que Empresa es
cierto símbolo o figura enigmática hecha con particular fin,
endereçcada a conseguir lo que se va a pretender y conquistar, o
mostrar su valor y ánimo. (345)
To undertake (emprender), to resolve to do an arduous or
difficult negocio, from the Latin apprehendere, because once the
intention is placed in the head, [he] intends to execute it. From
this it was said Empresa, this undertaking: and since the knights
errant would paint their shields, embroider their clothes [with
it], these designs and particular plans were called empresas; and
also the Captains [used them] in their standard when they went
on conquista. In this way, Empresa is a certain symbol or
enigmatic figure made to a particular end, raised in order to
achieve what will be feigned and conquered, or to show valor and
intent.
Empresa or enterprise as a fait accompli corresponds to events that have
come to a close, that are narrated in the preterit tense, much like the narratives
of the exploits of the knights errant (caballeros andantes). However, in the
lexicon, the time of conquistar and pretender remains open-ended.
31
Conquistar, pretender and emprender are used synonymously; conquista,
pretensión and empresa are thus corollary figures and fictions of one another.
In this way, the empresa of conquista remains viable for Covarrubias at the
turn of the 17th century. More than a century after the Tesoro de la lengua was
published in Madrid, the academics of the Real Academia include the business
venture as a second entry, as an extension of the first acceptance of empresa as
emblem or sign:
La acción y determinación de emprender algún negocio arduo y
considerable, y el esfuerzo, valor y acometimiento con que se
procura lograr el intento. (Autoridades 1732)
The action and decision to set forth or (undertake) an arduous
negocio worthy of consideration; and the effort, valor and
undertaking with which the intent is procured to be achieved.
Enterprise thus acts as a hinge between a negocio and a sign used to signify the
goal of an ”arduous,” “difficult,” negocio in the process of becoming. As in the
case of conquista, an action’s intention and an action’s result are conflated in
the term. Yet empresa also invokes the emblem, the “self-fashioning” of
Renaissance subjects within the parameters of socially acceptable standards.7
At the same time, empresa, an action in the service of a prize, conflates
standard with standard-bearer. As such, as an enterprise that required a
degree of self-reflection, it emphasized the subject’s identity and action in
juxtaposition to the empresas of others. The self-fashioning involved in
empresa offered the possibility of rupture but also continuity with the past.
7
Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning is the classic study of the constructed
persona among the upper and mobile classes of the Renaissance.
32
Thus, empresa and its agents incorporated the imagery of a battlefield and
combative interests. Ideally, however, conflicting accounts of different
empresas, could be forced to agree.
As Baldassar Castiglione (1478-1529) was to the self-made courtier,
Benedetto Cotrugli (d. 1468) was to the merchant, offering these words of
advice to the would-be “perfect” merchant in his book, Della mercatura et del
mercante perfetto (1573): “When you see a merchant to whom the pen is a
burden, you may say that he is not a merchant” (qtd. in López and Raymond:
375).8 Cotrugli’s insistence on self-inspection in different forms of writing—the
quaderno, giornale and memoriale—with various temporal horizons (daily,
monthly and yearly) offered episodic opportunities to juxtapose and reconcile
contradictions. These mercantile genres of introspection involved double
entry bookkeeping but also narrative accounts of verbal exchanges with other
merchants. The reconciliation of conflicting accounts was not only good for
business but could prove a point of honor, where contradictions had to be
ironed out in anticipation of liability claims and the testimonies involved in
litigation (377). The state of a merchant’s credit, that is, the belief (from
8
Cutruglio Raugeo (Kotruljevic of Ragusa) is thought to have written the book around
1400. The title page of the Venetian edition that was published in 1573 notes, “scritti
da piu di anni cx et hora data in luce” ‘written over more than one hundred and ten
years ago and now brought to light.’
33
credo) of his peers in his ability to keep his word, in turn, enabled access to
greater or lesser capital investment.9
Cotrugli’s “perfect merchant” is a humanist, lover of the arts and
writing, knowledgeable in local customs and laws, who is a master at
defending his own interests while recognizing the rights of others even when
transactions involved a zero-sum game. Thus, the perfect merchant shows a
certain effortlessness, akin to sprezzatura, in masking conflicts of interest. In
effect, Cotrugli’s manual of perfect (self) merchandising anticipates the
concerns and machinations outlined by Castiglione’s famous Cortegiano
(1528), though the correspondences made between word, honor, value and
comportment are unequivocal in Cotrugli’s book.
Throughout the 16th century, the law made explicit the conflicts of
interest inherent to ventures that pursued empresas for moral and material
gains. Yet, by the close of the sixteenth century, the changes in discourse
brought about by Spanish ventures in empire building unleashed a new
subjectivity with formidable power, capable of reconciling paradox and
marrying antitheses. Love and Interest could be yoked together in the service
9
See Sprague’s Romance of Credit (1940) for a spirited endorsement of the
capitalist’s word as his “credit” just as the term venture capital was coming into
vogue. Sullivan’s Rhetoric of Credit similarly references double-entry bookkeeping
and merchants’ diaries to emphasize the interpersonal exchanges of capitalism in
Jacobean London and to speculate on the reception of plays that represented City
exchanges. Sullivan’s recourse to the merchants’ manuals underscores the humanism
of their endeavors in an effort to contest Agnew’s Worlds Apart, a study of Jacobean
plays that largely emphasizes the alienating effect of commercial discourse on the
majority of audiences in 17th century London.
34
of empire seemingly without conflict, though the use of the term conquista
would become problematic, an unwelcome reminder of the embattled
positions and conflicts of interest that conquista signified.
The societas, or business partnership, which had always been more
palatable to Scholastic thought than loans, governs the structure for State and
Entrepreneur ventures in the Americas. These joint ventures relied on the
temporal paradox behind the etymology of conquista: they claimed ownership
over things, places, and technologies as yet to be discovered or created, but
nonetheless imagined; this enterprise engaged in discursive and practical
metalepsis in its confusion of causes for effects and vice versa.10 God’s
providence was confused with pro videntia, the foresight of the visionary
entrepreneur or self-made leader who believed and was credited with seeing
how and when the wheel of fortune would fall.
10
See the Introduction for a discussion of Gerard Genette's use of the paradox
involved in metalepsis from an ontological perspective in narratology ( 7-16).
35
Venture Capital, Societas and Conquista
The contracts between Crown, Church, Conquistadors and Crew can be
conceptualized as a series of venture capitalist schemes in which Crown and
Church provided "managerial expertise" to Conquistadors and Crew in
exchange for the quinta real (i.e, twenty percent) and tithing (i.e, ten percent).
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, venture capital thrives on the
commercialization of science and technology. The General Partners of Venture
Capital firms raise money, find and evaluate entrepreneurial ventures and
participate in their management to increase their value as rapidly as possible
but they do not provide the majority of capital invested in any one fund
(Freeman 146-7). In this way, the General Partners invest and distribute
capital provided by others, known as the Limited Partners of sequential
endeavors (or funds). Limited Partners are often family members or
acquaintances of the Entrepreneur and General Partners.
The Entrepreneur is the capitalist hero par excellence though, more
often than not, he will make the least capital gains among all the partners of a
fund, even if the enterprise was his original idea. If General Partners are
valued for their ability to build a corporate structure for greatest profit, the
Entrepreneur is credited with having the original idea and bringing it to
fruition “against all odds.” Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), the renowned
36
Harvard sociologist, placed particular emphasis on the role played by the
entrepreneur's foresight as a defining trait of his character:
Here the success of everything depends upon intuition, the
capacity of seeing things in a way which afterwards proves to be
true, even though it cannot be established at the moment, and of
grasping the essential fact, discarding the unessential, even
though one can give no account of the principles by which this is
done. (85)
Schumpeter's seminal description of the Entrepreneur raises the specter of
irrational belief and practice; the logic of his actions only makes sense after the
fact. Indeed, as a matter of narratological inquiry, Schumpeter's definition of
the entrepreneur engages in metalepsis, that is, the confusion of causes for
effects or vice versa. The unique faith of the entrepreneur—unique in that only
he believes in the enterprise at hand—defines him by the tautology of success,
in hindsight.11 However, in the end, the Entrepreneur’s intuition will receive
less remuneration than the managerial expertise of the General Partners, who
will also own the largest stake in the enterprise by the time the fund is
liquidated. Entrepreneurs are willing to relinquish ownership of the enterprise
to venture capital firms for the latters’ valuable social networks, necessary for
raising capital; because investment by a venture capital firm of renown gives
the enterprise “legitimacy” and attracts more investors; this leads to more
11
For François Perroux, Shumpeter’s vision of the entrepreneur, which confounds
abstraction with suggestion, exhibits “an epic sublimation of modern enterprise”(18).
In contrast with the production of knowledge of capitalism, of which the
entrepreneur’s “foreknowledge” is but a subset, Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle
Stengers explore the possibilities of yearning that break the knowledge/ belief binary
(66-71).
37
capital investment in the original idea and greater “scalability” or expansion.12
Also, General Partners are believed to organize the labor force more efficiently
and, having navigated nascent enterprises before, can apply practices and
structures learned from past experiences to the current endeavor. Thus, if all
goes well, even though the Entrepreneur loses most of the material stakes in
his original idea, the distribution of risk combined with a substantial capital
investment will offer a greater rate of return. For all their “managerial
expertise”, General Partners receive “carried interest” once the assets of each
fund are liquidated; "carried interest" is calculated after the original
investment of the Limited Partners has been returned of which, normally,
twenty percent belongs to the General Partners. This twenty percent often
make the General Partners the owners of the largest stake in the enterprise by
the time the fund closes.
In the early modern period, venture capital was known and practiced
under a different name: the commenda or, in Romanist jurisprudence, the
societas pecunia-opera (in qua alter imposuit pecuniam, alter operam) (the
societas to which one contributed the money, the other the labor) and the
contractus trinus (triple contract).13 Venture capital thrived as an alternative
to loans charging interest, especially from the mid 15th century onward
12
Though venture capital firms capitalize on the investment of various social and
economic institutions, they are not monolithic entities; rather partnerships are
broken, reformed and constructed with each new venture as the "social capital" of
each partner fluctuates. “Social capital” refers to the network of investors
commandeered by each partner in a fund.
13 The so-called “triple contract” was a loan that charged interest in the form of a loan.
38
(Noonan 133-53). Successful practitioners of the commenda, societas or triple
contract in the West Indies could commandeer one hundred to two hundred
percent profits per fund. Speaking of a Florentine merchant who was already
receiving such returns on his investments in the Americas as early as 1502,
Piero Rondinelli urged his fellow countrymen to invest in Bardi’s new funds
because “Francisco de’ Bardi s’à a fare riccho a meravaglia” ‘Francesco de’
Bardi knows so well how to get so rich that it is marvelous’ (qtd. in D’Arienzo:
227).
Rondinelli’s admiration for Bardi’s know-how adds another element to
the image, in the process of becoming, of America as cornucopia: it is not only
a place where commodities and labor abound but also where capital flourishes.
This reconciliation of the traditional oxymoron of usury—unnatural usufruct—
uncovers the vein of promised returns on investment that is the subtext of
Columbus’ first letter from his first voyage. In his first letter to Luis de
Santangel (d. 1498), Ferdinand of Aragon’s finance minister and the main
sponsor of the Admiral’s first voyage, Columbus marveled at the natural
bounty of the two main islands he had been observing:14
La Española es maravilla: las sierras y las montañas y las vegas y
las campiñas y las tierras tan hermosas y gruesas para plantar y
sembrar, para criar ganados de todas suertes, para edificios de
villas y lugares. Los puertos del mar, aquí no habría creencia sin
14
Luis de Santangel was a converso whose family had been persecuted under the
Spanish Inquisition. For his services to Castile and Aragón Santangel was awarded
exemption from scrutiny from the Inquisition just one year before his death. For more
on Jewish participation in the Spanish and Portuguese expeditions in ultramar see
López and Raymond (103-108).
39
vista, y de los ríos muchos y grandes y buenas aguas, los más de
los cuales traen oro.
The Hispaniola is a marvel: the hills and forests and meadows
and the countryside and the lands that are so beautiful and
loamy for planting and sowing, for raising all kinds of cattle, for
building villages and places. The ports, which you must see to
believe, and the many rivers, wide and deep, many of which carry
gold.
Columbus’s letters and Diario identify the opportunities for trade, mining,
agriculture and enslavement. Yet Columbus was more cautious than
Rondinelli would later be in his appraisal of opportunities for making money
from money. Soon, the oxymoron of flourishing capital gave way to a rapid
reconciliation of contradictory concepts and the original, more cautious
approach to usury by Columbus is superseded by comparisons between natural
and unnatural economic activities, a metalepsis without qualms.
Not only might one marvel at the fruits of the earth in the Americas, but
also at the knowledge, of a certain class of men, who knew how to make
money—no longer sterile—fruitful. The cornucopia of capital was not natural
to the Americas; capital was marvelous in the hands of a few who, in the short
term, controlled the capital flows into and without the continent. The
metaphors of the land’s bounty and the rivers’ depths were applied to that
most imperial of rhetorical figures: the translation, seemingly without
contradiction. The dearth of coin circulating in the colonies and uncertainty
about the value of commodities in exchanges within the American colonies
added to the circumscription of America as a place where money went to
40
multiply and leave.15 The dearth of coin can be contrasted to the
preponderance of accounts: diarios, ledgers, ship manifests, crónicas and
capitulaciones that all aspired for a settlement of accounts—in specie, in kind
and in tribute—at the close of each fund. Losses and gains became
commensurate items in the various methods for documenting profitable
violence. Tabulated risks could evolve into narratives of great riches or
increased material liabilities that, perhaps, were offset by the moral gains in
the behavior of the subject.
Risk taking and stake holding in an enterprise were not only a means
for making a profit, but also, and equally as important, a foil against
committing the mortal sin of usury. During the latter half of the 16th century,
financiers such as the Fuggers of Aubsburg, who financed the Hapsburgs' wars
on the European continent, sought greater clarity in canon law with regard to
loans that charged interest as insurance, a set up known as the "triple
contract” (Noonan 206-33). Indeed, it was the Fuggers who pushed for Pope
Paul III (r. 1534-49) to pronounce himself on the subject of the “triple
contract” in the early 16th century by arguing its similarity to the societas. The
financiers thus sought further validation for a practice that had enjoyed
forbearance if not approval over centuries, especially in the area of navigation
and exploration. Although the triple contract would remain a source of
polemic within Catholic realms, the societas continued to offer the moral
15
See Verlinden’s account of payment in specie and in kind in the colonies.
41
guarantee of risk and ownership, even though they were enterprises that
entailed no small measure of peril, to which narratives such as the Relación
(1542) or Naufragios (1552) of Cabeza de Vaca attest. At the same time, the
prevalence of bankruptcy and shipwreck placed more pressure on partners to
define levels of liability, often to the detriment of the smaller investors or
“limited partners.”16
How a subject took on risk became a defining character trait, showing
(in)commensurate courage or temerity in the situation at hand. Risky business
was a double-edged sword for defining the moral virtues or vices of men with
shared interests. These distinctions between licit and illicit, founded on moral
and immoral pursuits of profit on the basis of risk, were themselves grounded
on notions of propriety and property. On the one hand, as Noonan has shown
in The Scholastic Analysis of Usury, the equitable distribution of risk was the
main factor used by Scholastic thinkers to distinguish between a usurious loan
or a legal partnership; on the other hand, this appreciation of risk contradicted
Aquinas' axiomatic definitions of property that did not distinguish between the
use and value of property (133-153).
Following Aristotle's arguments against usury in Book V of the
Nicomachean Ethics and Book I of the Politics, Thomas Aquinas and other
theologians and canon lawyers of the medieval period made no distinction
16
See Weber’s History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages for an in
depth description of the parallel development of venture capital funds and firms and
their corresponding treatment as juridical personae.
42
between an object's use-value and its ownership, which rendered interest
nonsensical and unnatural: first, it made no sense to charge a debtor interest
on a loan whose purpose was obviously for the debtor's use. The creditor could
only expect to receive the principal of the loan back: second, it was unnatural
because, unlike a fruit tree, money was “sterile” and, thus, could not multiply
of its own essence. Yet the distinction between use-value and ownership did
arise in perilous areas beyond the boundaries of the nomos, that is, the sea. 17
It is at sea where the metaphors of fruit trees for usufruct no longer
apply and where interest gained legitimacy. Beginning with the Roman
practice of the foenus nauticum, a loan could not be charged interest unless
the creditor incurred the risk of loss on the principal of the loan. Following the
norms of the Roman Digesta, a creditor making loans out to ship owners could
avoid the charge of usury as long as the creditor assumed the full risk for the
loss of goods or value of the goods when they were actually at sea. Interest
17
In the Politics, Aristotle makes a distinction between commerce (which includes
seafaring), usury and labor. Yet all forms of wealth procurement beyond household
management are the object of the Philosopher’s derision:
There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of
household management, the other is retail trade: the former
necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is
justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain
from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is
usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the
natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange,
but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the
birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money
because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of
getting wealth this is the most unnatural. ( I.x)
43
charged for the time at sea was known as the “price of peril.” If, however, the
ship owner's losses arose after the journey's end, then the ship owner was
liable for the full amount of the loan. During the medieval period, the foenus
nauticum fell out of currency as a matter of law, though in practice it
continued to be employed by sea merchants and it was tolerated as a matter of
lex mercatoria, or common law among merchants. Indeed, the risks of loss to
life and property during sea voyages also made Scholastic thought more
amenable to the distinction between use and ownership when such risks were
pooled in the societas or business partnership.
The moral value of risk-taking led Scholastic thinkers, even Aquinas, to
contradict their own definition of property, and propriety, which they argued
in terms of use and usufruct: Though scholasticism made no distinction
between the use and ownership of money, it is precisely on the basis of such a
distinction that Aquinas defended the societas, i.e. in a partnership the
capitalist relinquishes use of his money to his partner but not ownership
thereof.18 The introduction of a third element, peril (and its price), drives a
wedge through the equivalence of use and ownership and allows Aquinas to
accept the societas, seemingly without contradiction.
18
Aquinas observes in the Summa Theologiae: "He who commits his money to a
merchant or craftsman by means of some kind of partnership does not transfer the
ownership of his money to him but it remains his; so that at his risk the merchant
trades, or the craftsman works, with it; and therefore he can licitly seek part of the
profit thence coming as from his own property." (II-II; 9; 78: 2, obj. 5)
44
In order to have a societas, or business partnership, the term that
continues to have currency in the Romance languages, ex. sociedad in Spanish,
two or more persons form a union of their capital and /or skills for a common
purpose.19 In the fifth of the Siete partidas, Alfonso X commends the societas
or compañía as a union of two or more men who seek to profit together that
can provide great benefits to all; however, partnerships for usury (dar logro)
were prohibited, although the law does not go into greater detail (Partida 5,
Título 10, Leyes 1-2). Aquinas even availed himself of risk for a definition of
ownership to which his earlier, axiomatic definition based on jus gentium does
not.20 Thus, a partnership in which one partner puts up capital and another
labor (or "sweat equity" as it is known today) is not usurious if the risk is
shared equitably, even though such a formulation would have been designated
usurious in land bound contexts (Noonan 143-5). This breach in the
continuum between use and ownership, which was at the heart of the
prohibitions against usury, creates a place where, as Walter Benjamin declared
in his Eighth Thesis On the Philosophy of History (1940), “the tradition of the
oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the
19
In the parlance of contemporary venture capitalists, a contrast is made between
“capital equity” and “sweat equity,” usually with time and labor receiving greater
weight in the distribution of profits at the entrepreneurial level.
20 Jus gentium is a legal term that originated in Roman jurisprudence that refers to
common law, or local customs that may be recognized by imperial magistrates as long
as they do not conflict with universal law. As Clarke observes in Fictions of Justice,
however, many “laws of peoples” aspire to universality. Currently, this is the case of
Shariah law in Africa, which is treated as jus gentium within the international
paradigm of human rights law even though Shariah also makes claims to universal
jurisdiction.
45
exception but the rule” (257). 21 Papal sovereignty used to authorize conquista
in areas “beyond the pale” of European dominion demarcates the “pontifical
mundo,” as depicted by Guaman Poma de Ayala, where violent cupiditas is the
tailwind to the nave of state, church and commerce. How did the invocation of
moral and material risks come to dominate territorial expansion even as this
expansion was sponsored by a financial system that was usury in everything
but name?
On the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the
Portuguese and Spanish Sovereigns negotiated the distribution of risk to
capital in distinct ways. In Acosta’s contrast between the Iberian Monarchs’
modus operandi, the Portuguese Monarch’s relationship to seafaring
entrepreneurs falls squarely within the foenus nauticum tradition. As the main
creditor to the ship owners and their employees, the Crown of Portugal could
claim full “ownership” of the enterprise and collect interest (or the “price of
peril”) because it had sponsored the voyages in full (Regum Lusitanorum
auspicijs, et auro parta sit) and had also contributed labor to the enterprise.22
What follows is a commensurate relationship between capital and dominion,
21
See also Agamben’s State of Exception that invokes Benjamin’s real state of
emergency as opposed to Schmitt’s tautology of sovereignty and the state of exception
that permeates internationalist legal hegemony.
22 Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) is the most obvious example of the physical
participation of Portuguese royalty in overseas expeditions. Note that Acosta
exaggerates in his estimations of the Portuguese Monarchy’s capital investments in
voyages sponsored by the Crown. However, his rationale for the contrast between the
two imperial powers proposes a causal relationship between capital and dominion,
which, in turn may offer an insight into the insurrections of the encomenderos in the
Indies in the 1540s and 1550s.
46
in which the Portuguese Monarch’s contributions leave no room for political
discourse (potuit penes Regem totus ille dominates sine iusta fuorum querela
retineri.) Yet Acosta leaves an opening for disputing claims to dominion within
reason. His casuistry could accommodate “just protests” (iusta querela) if the
Monarchs had not provided all or most of the needed capital, resources or
labor for the enterprise in question. For Acosta, the financing of the Spanish
Indies left such an opening for iusta querela.
Acosta’s political equation refers obliquely to the encomendero revolts
in the Viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain in the mid sixteenth century. The
encomenderos had disputed the Spanish Monarchs’ right to dominion and
usufruct in terms of capital and labor contributions to the conquest of the
Indies. The encomenderos received compensation in the form of indigenous
labor and tribute in exchange for the spiritual stewardship of new Christians
and new subjects of the Spanish crown. Thus, the encomienda system
compensated the past services of the conquistadors to the original expedition
(which had resulted in material and geopolitical gains) and present and future
actions (the ongoing “care” for Spain’s new subjects). Note that whether or not
the encomenderos were, in fact, complying with the second half of their
contractual obligations (i.e., spiritual and material stewardship) was of little
concern in Acosta’s allusion to (un)just quarrels with the Crown. A similar
comparison between investment (in labor and capital) and dominion had led
the curacas of the Mantaro Valley, in conjunction with the Dominican friars
47
Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) and Domingo de Santo Tomás (14991570), to outbid the encomenderos’ offer to buy out Philip II (r. 1554-1598) of
his dominion over Peru. The curacas’ and encomenderos’ negotiations with
the crown are discussed further in the fourth chapter.
If the Spanish Crown’s material and labor contributions had been so
slim, with what right could it restrict remuneration—in monies, tribute and
labor—and, at the same time, continue to profit from these enterprises? Unlike
the encomenderos, Acosta does not push his own logic to its obvious
conclusion, and turns to biblical authority to designate the Sovereign as the
final say on distribution (supremo omnium penes Regem imperio). Acosta
concludes that the encomienda system, in which conquistadores received land
use, tribute and labor from indigenous subjects in exchange for spiritual
stewardship and as payment for services provided, had emerged as a necessity.
The encomienda system was necessary, according to Acosta, because without it
the cupiditas, however inordinate, of men like the first conquistadores, would
be extinguished and without cupiditas there could be no evangelization in the
Americas.23 In other words, this desire (cupiditas) was itself a resource in the
service of conquest that had to be renewed; it was an emotional investment
that expected material returns which, in turn, fueled more desire. In this way,
desire functions like capital in its disjunction and alienation from its original
23
The premises in Acosta’s line of reasoning will be discussed in detail in the third
chapter, in contrast to the thought of Las Casas.
48
source.24 However, how could capital and desire provide the basis for
dominion? Acosta does not analyze the dynamics between capital investment,
cupiditas and empire in greater detail. At the same time, Acosta proposes a
commensurate relationship between capital investment and political dominion
that he himself is not quite ready to defend.
Acosta strikes a marked contrast between Portuguese and Castilian
modes of financing conquest that may be over determined. While it is true that
the Portuguese monarchs were majority stakeholders in 15th and 16th century
expeditions, the feudal station (mayorazgo) of Admiral evolved out of a
venture capitalist structure, one that was never fully abandoned. In the 12th
century, the Portuguese Crown made contact with Genovese merchants to
mount an offensive against Muslim held dominions on the Iberian Peninsula
and Northern Africa.25 In the 13th and 14th centuries, sea merchants linked to
the large commercial houses of Genoa, with large amounts of capital to spare,
were engaged by the Iberian monarchs for their ships, martial expertise, and
ship building techniques. Often, ships that were used for fighting were also
used for trading; oftentimes, the same men traded roles between merchants
and mercenaries based on the need of the moment (see D’Arienzo 12-59). The
first Admiral of the Iberian Peninsula was Ugo Vento, named by Alfonso X (r.
1252-84) to lead an expedition against the city of Solé in Morocco. Vento was
24
For more on alienation, Ollman’s inquiry into Marx’s theory has the most thorough
discussion of capitalism’s effects on all subjectivities captivated by its thrall, including
that of the capitalist.
25 The terms are outlined in the Historia compostelana, cap. 103.
49
followed by Benedetto Zacaria, also Genovese, who was named Almirante
Mayor del Mar by Sancho IV (r.1284-95).
By the reign of Alfonso XI of Castile (r.1312-1350), the position of
Almirante had taken on the qualities of the mayorazgo as a hereditary station.
Ambrogio Boccanegra, who served Enrique II (r. 1369-79), inherited the
admiralty from his father, Egidio Boccanegra, who was Alfonso XI’s admiral.
In Portugal, Emanuele Pessagno (Manuel Pessanha), Almirante d0 Mar de
Portugal, and King Denis made explicit the transition from payment for
services rendered episodically to a system of fealty. The admiralty was a
mayorazgo, or hereditary title, that required descendants of Pessagno to
swear loyalty to the king and to have twenty Genovese sabedores de mar ready
at all times; in return, the Pessagno family could use an emblem or empresa as
a sign of their house (a ring, a short sword and the royal arms). However, this
mayorazgo only supplemented the family’s affairs; the feudal structure was
grafted onto what had been a series of venture capital funds with an ensuing
inversion in ownership and management.
By the mid fifteenth century, the Portuguese Monarchy owned the ships
and the Pessagno admirals offered the “managerial expertise” for sustaining an
ongoing naval enterprise. For his know-how and leadership in commercial and
military endeavors, the Admiral received the “carried interest” or a fifth part of
all booty amassed from infidels and enemy kingdoms, except for slaves and
enemy ships that were claimed by the Portuguese Crown. The Pessagnos
50
continued to take freight and sell insurance on their own ships and
transported goods and slaves between Flanders, Lisbon, North Africa and
Genova on Portuguese navy ships when these were out of commission. This
did not amount to a “side business,” rather the admirals’ active involvement in
the commercial and mercenary networks of continental Europe and North
Africa made them all the more valuable to the Portuguese monarchy. The
monarchy also conceded an independent jurisdiction to the Admiral’s quarter
in Lisbon, offering a legal and spatial axis between capital and sovereignty that
Lisbon’s inhabitants navigated on a daily basis.26 Similar to the Portuguese
Admiral’s twenty percent share of all navy ventures, the Spanish monarchs
received the quinta real, or one fifth of all booty from conquistas on ships they
did not own.
Did the Portuguese model, lauded by Acosta, lead to greater political
power of the Portuguese Monarchs over their colonies, as the Jesuit scholar
suggested? Just as a comparison between the Iberian empires remains beyond
the scope of this dissertation, so to the larger question of the relationship
between capital and power may provide the true north, but not the final
destination, of this inquiry.27 However, the inverse proportions of capital
26
See D’Arienzo for reconstructed maps of Lisbon in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries.
The city’s distribution is begging for a reading in terms of “strategy”and “tactics”
along the lines of Michel de Certeau’s influential “Walking in the City” in The Practice
of Everyday Life. Genovese communities in the Mediterranean required similar
concessions in other cities, like Seville or Soldaia in the Ukraine, in return for
managing their navies.
27 As is well known, Marx was to have followed his voluminous Capital with a tome on
Politics.
51
investments offer a stark contrast in the subjects making claims to “managerial
expertise” in conquistas: in Portugal, the quinta de admiral; in Spain, the
quinta real. In Lisbon, the barrio de Admiral would be translated into the
Monarch’s own mini citadel: the Casa de Contrataciones in Seville.
The Bankers’ network had built its mini citadels across cities around the
Mediterranean, and Atlantic coasts of Europe and North Africa. It has been
widely accepted that though these settlements were profoundly different, their
planning reflected the subdivisions of the Genovese republic: castrum,
civitas, and burgus. The most strongly defended part of the Genovese comuna
was its commercial core, the castrum, which consisted of a gridded system of
urban blocks. This grid extended into the civitas, a second enclosed perimeter
that included the buildings occupied by the Genovese urban aristocracy.
Beyond the civitas, and always or almost always outside the walls, grew
the burgus or borgo ("town") in a relatively ad hoc manner: a heterogeneous
urban quarter in which building construction and daily life were no longer
constrained by the grid of the financial center (castrum) but, nonetheless,
revolved around it. In general, the Genovese did not live in the borgo or
impose direct rule on the city to which they had appended their fortunes.
Juxtaposed to the native city’s power center, the Admirals’ barrios and
Genovese quarters employed a strategy of independent management for the
commercial and territorial ambitions of their local clients and the comune of
Genoa. In the Spanish mode of conquista, the bankers’ city within a city took
52
on a new aspect with the construction of the casa de contrataciones in Seville
in the early 16th century. Taking its cue from the successes of the Genovese
model, the Spanish monarchy laid claim to the quinta and, in doing so, made a
larger claim to “managerial expertise” when overseeing the maritime trading
and colonial ventures also known as conquista.
Acosta’s comparison between the Portuguese and Spanish modes of
conquest does not refer to the Church’s early involvement with the Genovese
model of conquista. However, the earliest incursions into the venture capital
model on the Iberian Peninsula may be attributed to the Church and its ties to
the Genovese colony at Santiago de Compostela. It provided material and
spiritual incentives to Christians by outfitting commercial and martial
expeditions that bore a close resemblance to the usury that its theology
condemned. Offering material and spiritual compensation for sea merchants
and men fighting against Muslim populations in the Iberian Peninsula and
Northern Africa, Bishops were able to procure labor (among Christians) in
order to procure labor and materials (from the infidels) for major construction
projects. In the twelfth century, Diego Gelmírez (c. 1069-1149), the Bishop of
Santiago, funded his campaign in Northern Africa by purchasing the ships and
paying for a Genovese shipmaster to oversee the military and trading
expeditions; the Holy See supported the voyages by promulgating crusade
letters and bulls which allowed the Bishops to preach holy war against the
Moors in their dioceses and offer plenary indulgences to members of the fleet.
53
The Bishop received twenty five percent of all booty in addition to his share as
ship owner, which suggests involvement at both the General and Limited
Partnership levels in the fund. However, the sea merchants did not partake of
the spoils in labor. All Muslims who had been taken prisoner were to belong to
the Bishop in order to provide manual labor for the construction of the Church
dedicated to Santiago in Compostela.
The Church’s reckoning with sins, labor and ships for the construction
of, among other structures, a nave at a pilgrimage site brought a measure of
sanctity to maritime enterprises that had, for so long, existed beyond the
nomos of the land. After all, the ship as symbol for the Church has deep roots
in Christological and patristic imagery from the earliest period of Christianity.
Not only had the ledger book, as Le Goff has contended, influenced the
creation of Purgatory as the space where service of a spiritual debt involved the
activities of both the living and the dead; the ship of souls tossed on the waves
of profanity no longer brought the believers to safe harbor. Instead, the traffic
of souls, of believers and nonbelievers, became another currency in the
conquistas for monetary and spiritual rewards.
The Church as vessel for these souls no longer sought safe harbor,
rather it projected itself as underwriter for the exchange of goods, labor, and
indulgences in which it had much to gain in material and spiritual terms from
believers and non-believers alike. In effect, the Church had become party to its
own “triple contract.” Yet the spiritual insurance provided by the Church
54
would nonetheless, paradoxically, imperil its own powers in matters of the life
and death of the soul when it sought to adjudicate as well as participate in the
Conquest of the New World, a theme to be explored in greater depth in
chapters two and three. Moreover, accounting for credits and debits between
infidel labor and believers’ indulgences became infinitely more complex when
the discourse of the enterprise shifted, and everyone, including the former
enemy, was said to gain. The contradictions that emerge in the contracts and
laws drawn up to “reckon with” new subjects, slaves and neophytes in the
Americas are examined at greater length in the second chapter.
Following Seville, the other major centers of compañía en el banco y en
el cambio were Valencia and Palmas de Gran Canaria. Bankers such as
Francesco de Bardi, of the “marvelous” ability to make riches in the West
Indies, who also had personal connections to Christopher Columbus, operated
in Andalucía, the mid Atlantic Islands and in Santo Domingo. But the great
“revolving door” between enterprise and state could be found in Seville among
families of Genovese, Florentine and Andalusian origins as they jockeyed for
positions as financiers and state comptrollers of expeditions. Foreigners and
other “undesirables,” such as Portuguese conversos, who were nominally
prohibited from migrating to the Indies could nonetheless be called upon to
invest in venture capital funds. Foreigners were also nominally prohibited
from engaging in negocios and receiving concesiones or asientos. However,
55
procurement of a “naturalization” certificate allowed bankers of different
nationalities to make loans and occupy bureaucratic posts as a way for the
Crown to service its debt (Sanz Ayán 1-37). Thus, the foreigner prohibition and
naturalization exemption serve as another example of making recourse to the
exception when reckoning with limited access to capital and subsuming that
capital in the service of empire.28
The venture capital model serves to elucidate Spanish Sovereigns’
contributions to the imperial enterprise and to highlight some glaring conflicts
of interest. For example, it has been noted that before the large-scale
extraction of silver from Potosí, expeditions to the Spanish Americas operated
at a net loss (Fisher 22-3). However, in venture capital funds it is possible for
the enterprise to go bankrupt but for the General Partners and some Limited
Partners to receive carried interest. Within these parameters, the Crown and
Church would be the General Partners in a series of funds (conquistas and
descubrimientos). As providers of “managerial expertise,” they did not make
the major capital investments but organized and distributed the enterprises
through tangible and intangible forms aimed at rapid expansion (in the face of
competitors) and sustainability. Yet sustainability and scalability compete for
28
For Francis Bacon (1561-1626) “all states that are liberal toward naturalization are
fit for empire,” though Spain’s empire offered an exception worthy of note to the
English statesman and essayist: by “employ[ing] almost indifferently all nations in
their militia of ordinary soldiers, yea, and sometimes in their highest commands”
Spain was able “to clasp and contain so large dominions with so few natural
Spaniards” (150-1).
56
resources in any enterprise and come into conflict among the priorities
pursued by individuals within the Venture Capital Hierarchy.
It is worth recalling that the 1573 Ordenanzas did not restructure the
Crown’s investments in specie and in kind, rather the laws kept the Crown’s
initial investment at a minimum, maintaining a common practice that had
been in effect since 1504 with the official abolition of state sponsored
mercantilism.29 Yet as bankers and entrepreneurs organized transatlantic
trading companies in Seville, the Crown responded by creating its own minicitadel that structured the commercial activity of the financiers (cambiadores
u hombres de negocio) and merchants (mercaderes). Investors made
contributions to the fund both in coin and in kind, such as grains, animals,
clothe, weapons etc. leading to uncertainty in determining the relative values
of commodities, specie and, thus, distribution of ownership in any one
enterprise. This uncertainty stretched across enterprises and into the fiscal
operations of taxes and tribute. A banquero, mercader or hombre de negocio
could expect the award of an asiento as both loan guarantee and debt service.
The award of an asiento to tariff or tribute collection in specie or in kind gave
the asentista the right to collect and enforce collection in name of the State
29
As outlined by the Real Cédula of 1503 that ordered the creation of the Casa de
Contrataciones. Keeping capital investment at a minimum also reflected the constant
threat of the Crown’s impending insolvency. The Crown’s insolvency culminated in
crises of 1575 and 1597 when the Crown suspended payments on principal and
interest of loans from Genovese, Austrian and Castilian bankers.
57
and, in turn, to receive repayment for an outstanding loan to the Crown from
the monies or tribute collected by the asentista.30
The conflicts of interest inherent to such a system of repayments were
blatant to all parties involved. Cambistas and mercaderes of Seville lent their
expertise to the Crown: refining gold destined for the Casa de la Moneda.31The
term banquero first appears in Seville in the documents outlining the
liquidation of a fund owned by two Genovese brothers, Batista and Gaspar
Centurione. In their Convenio, they described themselves and their company
as “compañía en el banco y cambio, y fuera de él en cualquier manera” or
“cambio de Batista y Gaspar Centurione, banqueros”(Otte “Sevilla, plaza
bancaria europea” 93). Though this societas only lasted for three years (from
1507 to 1511), Gaspar Centurione formed another short-lived partnership with
Juan Francisco Grimaldi (from 1511 to 1514). In this way, the activities of the
Centurione and Grimaldi families in Seville reflect the classic pattern of
venture capital funds: a rapid succession of three year funds that create
accelerated temporal horizons for profit. Yet risks for the bankers were
30
Soon after the Crown’s cessation of payments in 1597, the Castilian Monarchy
followed the Portuguese Monarchy’s example in issuing asientos de esclavos as
repayment for capital loans to European financiers (Sanz Ayán 36-37). The
capitulación between Ferdinand of Aragon and Pedrarias Dávila shows an instance of
giving an asiento de esclavos as a method to finance the conquista in Tierra Firme.
For discussion of the slave trade as a form of financing, see the sections on the Laws
of Burgos (1512) and the requerimiento in the second chapter.
31 In 1517, the Crown assumed control of refining and minting gold for the Casa de la
Moneda. However, Gaspar Centurione held and sold the Mexican gold in a public
auction before refining, minting and liquidating the fund (and release of the quinta
real) could proceed. By 1522, Stefano Centurione was running the public auctions of
American gold for the Royal House of Coin.
58
plentiful as well; the failure of one expedition associated with the fund owned
by Díaz de Alfaro, Rodrigo Iñiguez and Bernardo Grimaldi, brother of Juan
Francisco, left Grimaldi bankrupt in 1510.32 Until that moment, Bernardo
Grimaldi had been the most active of all Genovese merchants in Seville.33 It
was the task of the Casa de Contrataciones and the Consejo de Indias to
ensure continuity among various funds, to thread a grand narrative of empire
from the various episodes of expeditions: from a series of conquistas, the
Conquista.
The appreciation in value of science and technology took on an
institutional form with the creation of such positions as the Piloto Mayor (first
held by Americo Vespucci) and the Universidad de Mareantes. As the state
reduced capital investments in each enterprise funded by various banqueros, it
built an apparatus that sought to reduce inefficiencies such as the loss of cargo
or life due to the lack of expertise of navigators or the temerity of expedition
leaders. The Universidad de Mareantes provided instruction and certification
in the use of instruments such as the astrolabe and cartography, creating
knowledge values for best sailing practices. The Crown constructed the Casa
de contrataciones, a mini-citadel, to manage the exchange of commodities,
treasures and people between Spain and the Americas.
32
For analysis of the first series of funds and their expeditions in the Americas see
Otte’s Sevilla y sus mercaderes and Sevilla, siglo XVI.
33 The misfortunes of the Grimaldi family as a whole were short-lived as evidenced by
the letras signed between Charles I (1516-56) and later Philip II (r. 1556-98).
59
Each capitulación signed between the Crown and Crew outlined
subordinate empresas to the main enterprise. Line by line, the identities of
the indigenous, as new subject or slave, were defined in lockstep with the
itinerary that delineated the geographical area and its peoples subject to the
conquista at hand. Stipulations not to weigh down the naos with too much
cargo, salaries for clergy, the different distribution schemes of booty at sea and
on land, the laws of inheritance, grains to be cultivated are not only orders to
be fulfilled but indices, or empresas, of the underlying structures of
investments, partnerships and ownership. On the one hand, bureaucracy
flourished in an attempt to reduce the risks of failure or corruption in each
imperial enterprise, each item in every contract signed between the socios.
Bureaucracy also acted in the service of each empresa’s stakeholders, many of
which also occupied official posts. It was not unheard of for the state treasury
to act as a guarantor to loans made by private bankers back to the state.34 On
the other hand, had they not incurred material risks these enterprises would
have been in danger of committing usury.35 Yet, if the Crown protested,
perhaps too much, that its share of material risk must be reduced, why then
does the Crown’s “managerial expertise” carry such a heavy price? Why do
34
Sanz Ayán offers a comprehensive panorama of the complex family and “national”
networks involved in trade, finance and politics in Castile and Aragón under the
regency of Ferdinand of Aragon and Juana I of Castile (1-20).
35 Following Philip II’s decision to cease payments to creditors in 1597, the Medio
General, a consortium of creditors made up of Genovese bankers, mostly, justified its
right to charge and receive back interest on loans based on moral arguments that
referred to the price of peril (Sanz Ayán 28). However, it would seem that suffering a
default on a loan would exemplify the instance of peril that had given moral
legitimacy to their moneylending in the first place.
60
some types of risk underwrite the moral propriety of economic activity while
others reflect poorly on the moral health of diverse subjects?
After all, risk taking was not without its moral faults. Courting risk in
games of fortune, such as cards or dice were frowned upon and, as in
Ferdinand of Aragon's contracts with explorers, strictly prohibited.36 As in the
1542 laws concerning the encomiendas and slavery, risk was not defined per se
but functioned as common currency in the moral economy of empire. Like
many coins in circulation at the time, ensuring the equivalence between the
face value and intrinsic value of peril was an activity fraught with anxiety.37
Interest and Inter esse
Venture Capital offers great rewards at great risk to its investors for it
traffics in a paradox of great import to the "Conquest of America": ownership
in something as yet to be discovered, invented or created. Unlike other
business ventures, the stakes are drawn in an enterprise before it begins or is
even completely understood. Failure of the enterprise brings great losses, but
success brings commensurate gains, often in novel ways. The promise of the
novel enterprise—and to own a piece of "it" before it comes to fruition—draws
investors to its cause. As such, this type of business venture arises from a
consciousness not readily explained by Scholasticism's powers of the soul
36
As in the capitulaciones signed with Diego Colón and Pedrarias or Pedro Arias
Dávila, among others.
37 See Elvira Vilches and her analysis of the confusion of value, specie and form,
generated by the influx of American bullion in Spain during the 16th century.
61
(memory, understanding, will). It also calls into question the argument made
by Edmundo O'Gorman in La invención de América that unless you intend to
discover an entity, it has not been discovered by you. Much like Juan Huarte
de San Juan's revision of Scholasticism's powers of the soul which replaced la
voluntad (the will) with la imaginativa (the imagination) during the latter half
of the 16th century, venture capital privileges the imagination as the faculty for
appropriation. Hence, stakes are drawn in an enterprise before it begins or
even completely understood. The "process" of exploration as the cultural
geographer John Allen argued, “is conditioned by the imagination” and the
interplay between received and empirical knowledge of terrae incognitae (58).
Like exploration, venture capital is an inter-subjective process of creation and
appropriation. As discussed in the previous section of this chapter, venture
capital's increasing acceptance as a legitimate means for profit drove a wedge
between use-value and ownership in canonical definitions of property and
moral propriety, an altogether unorthodox distinction that relied on, among
other things, the subject's penchant for taking risks.
Who were the venture capitalists? In 15th and 16th century Spain the
Limited Partners were wine, grain or wool merchants who had the
international networks and disposable income to invest large amounts of
capital or goods in short term conquista funds. In addition to being merchants
or merchant capitalists, as Braudel described them, they often held and
pursued asientos and juros within city governments or in the Casa de
62
Contrataciones.38 As creditors of the Crown and tax and tariff collectors, this
often led to conflicts of interest. Yet these Limited Partners were only one
piece of the venture capital puzzle.
A vocation limited to a reduced number of people within the venture
capital fund as a whole, entrepreneurship dominates narratives of conquest
and venture capital. Vocation, from <vocare, to call or summon, implicates
both the act of calling and the state of being called, an inter subjective dynamic
that bears some similarities to the duality of love, Lover and Beloved. Yet
proponents of capitalist vocation, such as Max Weber (1864-1920) and
Shumpeter, have turned the tables on the Aristotelian binary that favors the
“active nature” of the Lover over the passive nature of the Beloved. What
would be the implications of visualizing entrepreneurs as passive agents, i.e. as
being called? This calling, as Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the
38
Capitalism, as a term to describe the economic activities of Europe’s elite during
the early modern period, has been met with resistance. The compunction to "close
the door" on the term capitalism responds to the inherent circular logic behind
comparisons, especially across temporal divides. Yet, as Braudel concedes, “certain
mechanisms occurring between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries are crying out
for a name all their own. When we look at them closely, we see that fitting them into a
slot in the ordinary market economy would be almost absurd. One word comes
spontaneously to mind: capitalism. Irritated, one shoes it out the door, and almost
immediately, it climbs in through the window. Capital denotes only accumulations of
money but also the usable and used results of all previously accomplished work [...]
but capital goods only deserve that name if they are part of the renewed process of
production” (Afterthoughts on Material Civilization 45). See Banaji’s chapter on
“Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism” in Theory as History for a
discussion of Muslim traders’ contributions to the rise of the societas in seafaring
expeditions in the Mediterranean. Banaji takes issue with historians who project
Marx’s analysis of industrial capitalism onto earlier forms of merchant capitalism.
63
Rise of Capitalism, has a particular voice: an inter-subjective drive for material
and spiritual redemption that manifests capitalism as both choice and thrall.39
Invocation confuses the “calling” with “being called, ” yet narratives of
entrepreneurial efforts offer an insight into the upheaval of the Active/ Passive
binary in capitalist consciousness. Thus, despite the corporate nature of
venture capital, and the conflicting interests at play in each enterprise,
narratives of empresa portray the entrepreneur as a solitary figure who follows
a calling. Navigating the dire straits of Transatantic commerce, empresarios
heed the siren’s call, cupiditas incarnate, then court the risk, reap benefits and
live to tell the tale. The rise of romance and conquest narrative during
Europeans' quests within and beyond the bounds of Hercules's columns from
the twelfth century to the modern period, as explored by Nerlich and
Campbell, represent the subjectivity of booty-driven capitalism40 However,
even forms of “primitive” or “adventure capitalism” were corporate entities
with many individuals that responded to (a) calling(s) that incorporated
conflicts of interest and varying levels of liability among its members.
39
See also Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism for a heroic account of
Protestantism and its effects in overturning centuries of peroration against interest
and the merchant class. Tawney’s account underscores the rise of personal liberty as
the result of religion assigning moral values to individual choices. For a provocative
reading into Capitalism’s thrall and the place of Marxism in a global re-volution in
consciousness see Stengers and Pignarre in La sorcellerie capitaliste.
40 Booty driven or adventure capitalism is the term employed by Weber to describe
economic practices that rely on raids led by charismatic leaders on foreign countries
for the sake of treasure (extracted from temples, tombs, mines, the chests of
conquered princes, or levies on a population's jewelry or ornaments).
64
The etymology of interest, from the Latin inter esse or inter-being,
refracts onto the processes of incorporation in the construction of companies
and empires. The legal personhood of corporate entities masks their
ambivalence, or the coexistence of at least two opposed and conflicting wills.
As Weber concluded in his History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle
Ages, the law struggled to define the juridical personhood of these
partnerships in the context of international commerce. The Statutes of Genoa
(1588-9) codify into law the multifaceted hierarchy of venture capital firms
more than a century after the household and the physical warehouse (bottega)
had given way to the various accounts in capital held by each firm. The terms
of liability changed and multiple personae emerged. Partners of a societas
were only liable for those contracts signed by another partner who represented
the other members of the firm. The duplex persona (double personality)
emerges to account for distinctions between propia negotia (personal
business) or quorum nomina expenduntur (those whose names have been left
out). In this way, the identities and “personhoods” can change from fund to
fund.
However, synecdoche, the trope for personhood in the societas, unless
made explicit by the individual contract, both loses its function for
representing empresas in liability cases while having an exaggerated role in
the figures of entrepreneurs as heroic, solitary figures; a totality, or corpus, is
affirmed in the legal fictions of the societas but it remains in constant flux.
65
This explains, in part, the incongruity of the many figures of metalepsis in
representations of venture capital enterprises.
The disconnect between the corpus mysticum ex pluribus nominibus
conflatum (a juristic person comprised of many names) and the narrative of
these firms’ actions widens in adventure writing ideology. As the law attempts
to keep abreast of liable persons and personhoods in international commerce,
the multifaceted duplex persona sets out on heroic, individualized quests.
Rather than representing hybrid corporate beings, narratives of empresas
represent knights fighting the monsters without, though evident sutures in
heroes’ characterizations warn of the monster within. One such suture is the
topos of the double name or translated names of the hero in adventure writing.
The possibility of Leviathans venturing out on quests seems almost
nonsensical, or topsy-turvy, much like the adventures of the giants Pantagruel
and Gargantua and the institutions founded by them in the Pantagruel series
narrated by François Rabelais (c. 1483-1554).41 In contrast to the bricolage
characteristic of mythological thought, as elaborated by Claude Lévi-Strauss,
the duplex personae of the empresa, though monstrous, are cut from the same
clothe of goal oriented and capital driven ad-ventures. In this sense, the
uniform delineations of corporate personhood in venture capital funds are
closer to Miller’s concept of the “suture” to trace the subject’s insertion, via
41
In Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin is able to reconstruct the order of the author’s
world by untangling the carnivalesque reversals of mores and discourse employed in
the Pantagruel series. See also Duval for a reading of the Pantagruel series as a
humanist’s rebellion against the monstrosity of Scholastic thought.
66
signifier, into the symbolic order of language. That the monstrous nature of
venture capital funds should split into inordinate desires on the one hand, and
the ordering impulse on the other, speaks to the conflict of interests embodied
by corporate beings that, nevertheless, attempt to erase their inter esse.
It is no wonder then that the most ardent critic of the system of martial
commerce in the West Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas, would withhold the
names of the individuals whose actions he condemns in the Brevísima. To do
otherwise would be to succumb to the logic of the commenda and its system
for limiting the liability of General Partners who, at the apex of the venture
capital firm, kept separate accounts for each fund (i.e., the limited
partnerships); this not only limited their liability for each failed fund but also
allowed them to profit from each and every success.
The military and literary career of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y
Valdés (1478-1557) elucidates the bifurcating trajectory of adventure writing
ideology. A Spanish courtier turned adventurer and businessman in the
Caribbean, Fernández de Oviedo wrote his Claribalte (1519), a chivalric
romance, in Spain shortly after his return from his first trip to the West Indies.
Oviedo’s Claribalte follows the genre’s topoi and the metaleptic insertion of
the producer in the production. For example, the author affirms that he offers
his readers but a translation of an original work that had been written in
Tartar, which he found in the kingdom of Firolt. The hero’s cupiditas and the
impetus for his travels is set off by the invocation of Claribalte (whose name is
67
“translated” as Félix). Félix then wages a tour de force throughout Europe with
the aid of a magic sword and necromancers. Set in a Christian era before the
“discovery” of America, Claribalte’s story never makes it as far as the New
World although he does suffer a shipwreck off the Cape Verde islands.
Through strength of arms, magic, a fortuitous marriage and the protagonist’s
own illustrious lineage, Claribalte not only manages to kill the giants of the Isla
Prieta (Black Island), but also secure the Crown of Emperor of Constantinople
and the seat of supreme Pontiff of the Christian world in Rome. Thus,
Oviedo’s synthesis of spiritual and temporal powers in the figure of the
chivalric knight reconciles the stark contrasts among interests held by the
Church, State and investors in venture capital funds. By constructing the
narrative climax around the (con)fusion of spiritual and temporal powers,
Oviedo’s Claribalte depicts a unified terrain of European dominion. This
depiction of continental unity, however, could not be further from the reality
on the ground: an emerging schism in the Church with the Reformation and
failed attempts to reconcile differences between the Orthodox and Roman
Churches.42
Claribalte’s double throne accomplishes in chivalric fiction the
pretensions to temporal and spiritual dominance as outlined by the Conquest’s
General Partners in the legal document known as the Requerimiento (1511).
42
In a clear nod to Weber, Mazzotta contends that the “Age of Disenchantment”
began with the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1437 when the Bishops of the Roman
Church were unable to reconcile the schism with the Greek Orthodox Church.
68
The requerimiento’s author, probably Juan López de Palacios Rubio (14501520), presents the universal authority of a Church whose seat is in Rome but
could be moved anywhere. As presented by the requerimiento, the Church’s
universal dominion allowed its Supreme Pontiff, Pope Alexander VI (14311503), to “give” part of the world west of the Cape Verde and Azores Islands to
Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon and their descendants. However,
both the papal bull Inter caetera (May 4, 1493) and the Treaty of Tordesillas
(June 7,1494) were promulgated after the fact of capital investment and
returns on investment in Portuguese and Spanish journeys of exploration West
and East of the Iberian Peninsula.
The Papal Donation and the requerimiento are analyzed within the
larger context of legal developments throughout the sixteenth century in the
second chapter. For now, Oviedo’s incursion into adventure writing ideology
serves as a reminder of the various fictions at play in the Conquista, including
the legal ones. More than a century before the conquest of the Canary Islands
(known as the Fortunate Isles), Luis de la Cerda received the title of Caballero
de la fortuna from the Pope in Avignon .43 Like the trajectory of the
eponymous knight errant in the Claribalte, who, like don Luis de la Cerda, also
assumes the epithet Caballero de la fortuna, the narrative of conquista blurs
the causality between causes and effects. Yet there is some truth to Claribalte’s
43
Petrarch describes the ceremony, which he claims to have witnessed, in De vita
solitaria (II.xi). As D’Arienzo contends, the titles to the Canary Islands may have
been rewarded to the Castilian claimant following a failed Florentine-Portuguese
expedition to the same islands in 1341. Boccaccio gives an account of this voyage in De
Canaria et de insulis ultra Hispaniam in Oceano noviter repertis.
69
narrative fictions: the fact of spiritual and temporal dominion rewards the
empresario after a difficult and arduous journey, not before.
Upon his return to the West Indies, Oviedo channeled his imperialism
as self-appointed royal historiographer. The Historia general y natural de las
Indias (1535, Primera Parte) and its Sumario (1526) exploits the chivalric
quest for its narrative horizon: the cornucopia or grail. By offering his readers
a treasure trove, i.e. a thesaurus, of exotic commodities and moralizing
anecdotes, the self-proclaimed royal historiographer pursued the temporal and
spiritual dominion visualized at the close of the Claribalte.44 Rather than
follow the trajectory of one knight-errant, Oviedo offered up his pen to
document all the wealth and exploits at the service of Conquista. An ardent
defender of the Spanish Crown’s rights to the Indies, Oviedo enjoined his
fellow conquistadors to efficiency in their pursuit of profits through violence.
Oviedo did condemn the use of indiscriminate violence against the native
peoples of La Florida by the failed expeditions of Pánfilo de Narvaez (14781528) and Hernando de Soto (c.1496-1542). Yet his condemnation of
indiscriminate violence, as Rabasa contends, begs the question of what exactly
constitutes a discriminating use of violence (see “Violence in De Soto
Narratives” in Writing Violence). In effect, Oviedo urged his peers to follow a
44
For the authoritative analysis of Cornucopia and Grail topoi in the context of
Mediterranean mercantilism and its increasing deployment of the check as forms of
payment that operate on a dialectic between absence/ presence see Shell’s The
Economy of Literature and Money, Language and Thought.
70
cost-benefit analysis of their violence. To claim Oviedo as a pacifist would be
an exercise in the absurd.
Legitimacy and efficiency dovetailed in Oviedo’s program for a
successful empire; a thorough knowledge of the peoples in the process of
becoming subjects of the Spanish empire complemented the textual
cornucopia of riches he offered his readers. Within Oviedo’s ethos of Spanish
and Christian dominion over the West Indies, the bounty of knowledge turned
epic narrative on its head. Rather than defining the horizon of desire for the
quest, the treasure trove, or thesaurus, became the start and end of capital
funded ventures. Like the discomfiting oxymoron of the capital begetting
process, reconnaissance for the sake of creating more knowledge to inform
even more quests obeys its own self-replicating dynamic: the preferred trope
of scalability that functions contiguously but projects itself mimetically.
Subjugated peoples, their territories, and the Beloved share the verb
that places them in the sights of the conquistador and lover: the requerimiento
de amores y de gentes. Yet the entrepreneur in conquest was also something
of an active listener to voices whose traces we can elicit from narratives of
conquest.45 Indeed, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist follow a calling,
one that serves to remind us that the periphery makes possible the kind of
economy and society found at the core and vice versa, as Harvey proposes in
“The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation.” Yet the master fable of solitary
45
Trace as used by Derrida and Gayatri Spivak in the preface to her translation of his
Of Grammatology.
71
Entrepreneur/ Lover endowed by foresight, prescient in his ability to intuit
success, nonplussed by rejections to his advances by the Beloved, glosses over
the inter subjective nature of interest. Narratives of these corporate efforts that
accept the legal fictions of the societas and its discoveries settle accounts and
liabilities all too prematurely.46
The multifaceted agency of societas and empire makes it difficult to
define the moral personas of these corporations in order to adjudicate
liabilities. Thus, Weber’s definition of the modern state as “the monopoly over
the legitimate use of violence” falls short of describing the interaction between
capital and violence in “foreign” conquests.47 In this sense, discussions of
corporate, legally sanctioned violence, such as Conquista, that fail to engage
with piracy, mercenaries and banditry remain circumscribed by the tautology
of legally sanctioned violence. The shift in discourse to (en)force a
46
Excellent descriptions of the legal debates surrounding the Spanish Conquest can
be found in the works of Helen Parrish and Lewis Hanke. See Pagden for an approach
that emphasizes the origins of modern ethnography within an Aristotelian framework
for subjugating foreign peoples. See Adorno in Polemics for her proposed Latin
American narrative tradition founded within Spanish legal debates on possession.
47 See Barkawi for an in depth discussion of the conceptual gaps that arise when
scholars maintain the categories used by economic and imperial powers to obfuscate
the interrelations between political and economic violence when analyzing violence
and its origins. As Barkawi contends, “The choice of term already suggests that
organizing force beyond the jurisdiction of the local state is abnormal. It means
literally beyond the jurisdiction of the local state, indicative of the juridical character
of much of the reasoning behind employments of Weber's definition of the state. A
gap is opened between juridical and de facto relations, a gap one could drive an army
through, but an army opaque to social scientific inquiry based on juridical premises”
(37). Barkawi’s analysis is clearly indebted to Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum on
the state of exception.
72
reconciliation between antithetical love and interest falls squarely within this
tradition.
Chapter Two
En(Forcing) Love Interest: Contracts and the Law in the Conquista of America
Es sin duda el bien de todas las cosas
universalmente la paz; y así, donde quiera
que la ven la aman. Y no solo ella, mas la
vista de su imagen de ella las enamora y las
enciende en codicia de asemejársele, porque
todo se inclina fácil y dulcemente a su bien
[…] Porque si navega el mercader y si corre
los mares, es por tener paz con su codicia,
que le solicita y guerrea.
-Fray Luis de León, De los nombres de
Cristo (1583)
Porque estimamos en mucho más, como es
rrazón, la conseruaçión de sus vidas, que el
ynterese que nos puede venir de las perlas…
-Charles I, Leyes nuevas (1542)
The conquistadors and their general partners sought out populations;
their projections for profitable violence did not envision deserted landscapes
as areas fit for conquista. As Tomlinson contends with his exemplum of the
Bermudas, uninhabited spaces were largely avoided by Spanish, English and
French explorers throughout the sixteenth century unless they were lured
there by the natural resources in the area.1 However, even a strategically
situated archipelago in the Gulf Stream could be largely “shared,” in transit, by
ships laying anchor to replenish fresh water and other supplies as long as there
were places, with peoples, to be invaded; a lack of aboriginal presence made
1
Tomlinson opens The Singing of the New World with a reflection on Bermuda and
its “haunting” voices.
74
that land strangely undesirable to new claims. That indigenous populations
would give purpose to these projects of imperial expansion, lends another
dimension to conquista: it cannot be imagined properly without an
interlocutor, also the object of the envisioned expropriation of inhabited, and
therefore habitable, territories.2 Though ceremonies of possession, to borrow
Seed’s term, did take place in the absence of indigenous interlocutors, the
scripts of these performances were nonsensical without the imagined
presence, at the very least, of the anticipated aboriginal other.
Indigenous inhabitants were not only expected but, indeed, desired. Yet
this desire for an indigenous presence brought to the fore the intended
violence of the undertaking. Staking a claim to land, the literal demarcation of
the earth by the nomos, as discussed at length by Carl Schmitt, is an act of
foundational violence underlying the guarantees of the law.3 What, then, is to
be made of the act of staking claims to land that is already inhabited? Have the
inhabitants made no claim to the land? Do they not have a nomos of their own
2
Thus Pierre Chaunu made the unequivocal distinction between conquête and
conquista: “La conquista, non la conquête […] La conquista n’implique auncune
action sur le sol; elle n’ entraine aucun effort en profondeur pour entamer un nouveau
dialogue entre l’homme et la terre. La conquista ne vise pas la terre, mais uniquement
les hommes” “The conquista, not the conquest. The conquista, does not imply any
action on the ground; it does not bring about any effort in depth to start a new
dialogue between man(kind) and the land. The conquista does not aim at land, but
only at men” (120). In elaborating on this distinction, conquista/ conquest, I might
add that the indigenous acted as an intermediary between the conquistadors and the
“new” lands through systems of indirect rule.
3 The Greek nomos is the unit of land whereby Schmitt analyzes nomos as “the
measure by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated; it is also the
form of political, social and religious order determined by this process. Here,
measure, order, and form constitute a spatially concrete unity”(70).
75
and, if so, why would their claim be lesser than that made by the new
claimants? And if they have no nomos, that is, no law of their own, then
wouldn’t this lack make them effectively lawless? Yet can there be habitation
without the law? Or habitation without knowledge for that matter? The not
entirely rational desire of the European venture capitalists to seek out
inhabited terrae incognitae, an obvious contradiction in terms, set the stage
for the over determined debates on the nature of those inhabitants and
legalistic inquiries into rights that continue to receive a priori treatment in any
discussion of the so-called Conquest: the Papal Donation and the laws of
peoples (jus gentium).4 It bears reminding that the question of the nature of
indigenous peoples and their rights arose from a specific profit motive:
usufruct from the indigenous in the form of labor and tribute. Any discussion
of the Papal Donation should begin with this profit motive, that depends on
contact with (an)other humanity, clearly articulated in Pope Alexander VI’s
bull Intercaetera (May 4, 1493):
Sane accepimus quod vos, qui dudum animo proposueratis
aliquas insulas et terras firmas, remotas et incognitas ac per
alios hactenos non repertas, querere et invenire, ut illarum
4
The so-called Papal Donation refers to the three bulls promulgated by Alexander VI
in 1493. Eximiae devotionis (May 3), Inter caetera (May 4) and Dudum siquidem
(September 26) sought to incorporate “discoveries” made by expeditions managed by
the Spanish monarchs into previous schemata for conquests of terrae incognitae
developed with Portuguese sovereigns in the 15th century. The bulls set the stage for
the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. What exactly the Pope
had donated and whether he had the right to do so were questions hotly debated by
Encinas, Palacios Rubio, Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas, Juan
Sepúlveda, Francisco Suárez to mention a few notable authors.
76
incolas et habitatores ad colendum Redemptorum nostrum et
fidem Catholicam profitendum reduceretis […]
We have indeed learned that you, who for a long time had
intended to seek out and discover certain islands and mainlands
remote and unknown and not hitherto discovered by others, to
the end that you might bring the worship of our Redeemer and
the profession of the Catholic faith to their residents and
inhabitants.
Unlike the venture of the Bishop of Santiago de Compostela, Diego Gelmírez,
discussed in Chapter One, the imagined scenario for material and spiritual
profits (i.e., converts to Catholicism) does not equate the losses of the
vanquished with the victor’s gains. In the Bishop’s expedition to North Africa,
the Muslim infidel remained the enemy from death to enslavement; the
infidels’ losses were the bishop’s gain. In the Alexandrine bull, however, and, it
must be added, in other conquistas of Muslim held territories, the possibility,
indeed, necessity to convert the other complicated the profit motive of
absolute hostilities.5 Instead, it was argued that the inhabitants of the terrae
incognitae would have something to gain, i.e., Catholicism, despite their
losses. In the conversion paradigm, accounting for the indigenous became
increasingly complex; by virtue of contact, inhabitants of coveted (yet
unknown) lands were both enemies and potential brethren in Christ.
5
Taking her cue from Las Casas, Seed argues that the requerimiento originates in
Muslim practices of conquest. See Derrida’s “On Absolute Hostility” in his Politics of
Friendship for a sustained analysis of the contradictions inherent to Aquinas’
distinction between inimicus and hostis.
77
These anticipated interactions in the context of profitable violence
redefined tropes of conduct, expected rewards and (un)founded fears. Recall
the ‘writing violence,’ to borrow Rabasa’s concept, in the Intercaetera which,
in one breath, attested to the existence of ‘peoples who live peacefully’ in the
newly discovered lands (“in quibus quamplurime gentes, pacifice viventes […]
inhabitant”), yet commended the foresight of Columbus and his men to ‘build
a well-fortified fort’ (“unam turrim satis munitam”) whence they could ensure
the expansion of “Christian empire” and the reach of its enterprise.
The complexity of the desire of European invaders for the indigenous
presence in the Americas has been attributed by Roland Greene to a
Petrarchan subjectivity expressed as a first person singular whose unrequited
love for a silent Beloved leads to painful introspection. Yet, much unlike Laura,
the indigenous of the Americas were anything but unresponsive to the claims
and clamor of their invaders, as suggested by the promulgations of Alexander
VI and Isabel of Castile. Moreover, when the Crown enjoined the
conquistadors to treat the indigenous amorosamente, con mucho amor, or con
dulçura, this injunction was accompanied by a prerogative to document native
beliefs, practices, social organizations i.e. to listen.6
6
Ranajit Guha provides an indispensible framework for reading colonial documents
as counter-insurgent texts in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial
India which then supply indices of subaltern subjectivity and ingenuity in their acts of
resistance against empire. Guha’s view of imperial listening (through filters, as it
were) can be contrasted with Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern speak?” and
Rabasa’s rejoinder, “can ‘we’ listen”?
78
Loving the indigenous was codified in law and related in Spanish. By
virtue of translation, eros, storge, agape, philia, cupiditas and caritas could be
loosely rendered as amor.7 The complexity of amor and amar as umbrella
terms to denote various acts and states of being from passions and emotions to
virtues and duties comes to the fore in the entries for amores and amar by the
famous Andalusian lexicographer, Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco (15391613):
AMAR, es querer, o apatecer alguna cosa. Amor es el acto de
amar, lo primero y principal sea amar a Dios sobre todas las
cosas, y al próximo como a ti mesmo. Díxose del verbo Latino
amare. No tengo que deternerme aquí pues he dado etimología
Latina.
AMORES, de ordinario son los lasciuos, tratar amores, tener
amores. Amores, requiebro ordinario. Amoricones, los amores
entre villanos. Amorío por amor, término aldeano. Amada la
querida. Amigo y amiga, se dize en buena y en mala parte, como
amador y amante: amigado el amancebado con la amiga:
amigarse, amancebarse […] amante el que ama y amantes los que
se aman. (63)
TO LOVE, is to want, or desire something. Love is the act of
loving, which first and foremost is the love for God above all else,
and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. From the Latin verb,
amare. I need not explain this further as I have given the Latin
etymology.
LOVES, in the lascivious sense, to make love, to have a love.
Loves, an ordinary [or vulgar?] compliment. Amoricones, the
7
For Plato eros was a painful passion, similar to allegory in its effect on the subject
(Symposium). See also De Man and Roilos for their interpretations of allegory in
platonic terms. Hellenist visions of eros, more generally, is a passion induced by the
Gods in humans, ie. of an external origin to humanity. Storge, the love of family, is a
duty that, for Aristotle, edifies the commercial pursuits of merchants. The duty to
provide for loved one elevates an occupation otherwise contemptible for its pursuit of
material gains. Agape, as employed in the New Testament, refers to altruistic love.
Philia refers to brotherly love. Both philia and agape comprise the Latin usage of
caritas, especially as employed in Aquinas.
79
loves among peasants. Love affair (amorío) for love, the term
used by villagers. Beloved, f., the desired one, f. Friend (m.) and
Friend (f.) are used, in a good and a bad sense, as lover and
mistress: befriended [refers to] the man who cohabits with a
mistress: to set up house together, to live together […] lover is
the one who loves and lovers are those who love each other.
Covarrubias opens his entry with an allusion to the appetite for things
(cupiditas) which is soon followed by a definition of love that seems to
reference Aquinas’ understanding of caritas as the “amicitia quaedam est
hominis ad Deum” ‘friendship of man for God’ and the love of neighbor, but
also in “excellentior … omnibus aliis virtutibus” ‘the most excellent of virtues’
(Summa theologiae. 2-2. q. 23. a.6). 8 Covarrubias follows the allusion to
Aquinas with an elliptical reference to the Latin etymology of amare and a
more detailed exploration of amor in its plural, colloquial forms. The amores
entry explores the ramifications of cohabitation, especially among the lower
classes. The requerimiento de amores, the forceful courtship of the Beloved,
belongs as much to low brow as well as high brow codes of love in the
Romance language tradition.9 The juxtaposition of cupiditas and caritas in the
amor entry by Covarrubias undergoes a reconciliation via the metalepsis of
8
Virtue, when accounting for its Latin etymology, is a highly gendered term. Virtue,
from virtu< vir meant “manliness” in classical Latin. See Price, Nederman and Wood
for discussions of Machiavelli’s constant references to virtù as a discursive effort to
eschew with Christian ideas of virtue in favor of the original Latin sense of
“manliness” or “prowess.” See Bloch for her analysis of the gendered use of “virtue” in
revolutionary America.
9 Numerous studies of lyric, love poetry could be mentioned here. I am particularly
fond of María Rosa Menocal’s Shards of Love.
80
conquista, one intimately related to translation and the commonplace
traductio imperii, traductio studii.10
As Nebrija (in)famously argued, “language is the handmaiden of
empire.” In this case, amor as a translation of terms that denote a conflicting
affect and ethics—cupiditas and caritas come to mind—was too broad,
imprecise, overarching. It’s not that cupiditas was never translated into the
more precise codicia, the desire for things. Moreover, Christians’ love for God
and for each other (caritas) was the subject of treatises in Castilian.11 It would
also require a stretch of the imagination and an over determined faith in the
power of language to suggest that all encompassing amor could wreak such
havoc in discourses and practices of cupiditas and caritas.
Yet the (con)fusion generated by the metalepsis of Love and Interest
offered a seamless reconciliation, in name, of conflicting passions and virtues.
Amor was efficient for the purposes of empire for it reconciled cupiditas and
caritas without a change in nomenclature. The synonymous use of Amor as
caritas and cupiditas, offered a seamless transition to an economy of love.
However, this metaleptic habitus of conquista, where people and their things
and their residences on this earth could become both the object of cupiditas
10
See Curtius for his classic study of this trope. Also, Navarrete for the expression of
this trope in the poetry of golden age Spain in the aptly titled Orphans of Petrarch.
11 By no means an exhaustive list, these are some of the most representative works on
caritas written in Spanish in the 16th century: De los nombres de Cristo (1583) by
Fray Luis de León (1529-91), Tratado de la vanidad del mundo (1574) by Diego de
Estella (1524-78), Llama de amor viva (c. 1585-6) by John of the Cross (1542-91), and
Moradas (1577) by Teresa de Jesús (1515-82).
81
and caritas, was met with resistance by the critics of conquest, for the push to
reconcile caritas and cupiditas took aim at Christian values as a whole; the
conventional antithesis of amor and interés was difficult to overcome.12
In this sense, Greene's focus on the cupiditas and concupiscence of
conquest elaborates on one potent aspect of Petrarchan subjectivity that goes
to the heart of the (con)fusion of love in the Romance languages in general.
What goes missing, however, is the counterpoint of Christian remorse, the
literal self fracturing that characterizes Petrarch's fragmentation between
caritas and cupiditas (so memorably rendered in Poem 30 of the rime sparse,
a reworking of the hierarchy of adoration in Psalm 118 in the Vulgate).13 The
subjectivity of venture capital is no less complex than the fragmented self but
strives for reconciliation. If Petrarchan subjectivity sees itself reflected on a
shattered surface, the expanding subjectivity of venture capitalism (its
scalability) approaches itself within a labyrinthine world of ramifications and
12
In one of the more brazen efforts to reconcile caritas and cupiditas, Balbuena’s
Grandeza Mexicana offers a celebration of Mexican mercantile capitalism that would
place private interest at the service of the Christian, public good and vice versa.
Ercilla’s diatribe against interest in the Araucana is a classic example of the depiction
of private interest as the public good’s (bien público) foremost enemy (Cantos III and
XXV). This is not to say that Ercilla’s rejection of amor as “love interest” in Cantos III
and XXV indicated an overall rejection of the imperial project. Ercilla was certainly
critical of the empire he served. So, too, were Oviedo y Valdés and, as we shall see in
greater detail in the third chapter, José de Acosta.
13 This is Petrarch’s (in)famous confession that his covetousness for Laura is a form of
idolatry. The last three lines of the sestina read as follows: “L’auro e i topacii al sol
sopra la neve/ vincon le bionde chiome presse a gli occhi/ che menan gli anni miei sì
tosto a riva” “gold and topaz in the sun above the snow/ vanquish (or are vanquished
by) the golden locks next to her eyes/ that lead my years so quickly to shore”
(emphases mine, Durling’s translation). These lines overturn the hierarchy of caritas
over cupiditas in Psalm 118 of the Vulgate: “ideo dilexi mandata tua super aurum et
topazion” ‘I have loved thy commandments above gold and topaz.’
82
tautologies. While emphasizing the individuality of each partner, the
corporate fund believes it has found the shortcut through the eye of the needle.
Its amor for the indigenous—that is, caritas and cupiditas, hand in hand—
satisfies the body and soul in their preparations to receive grace and the
material comforts of life on earth.
Yet for caritas and cupiditas to gain some kind of rhetorical
equivalence, they have been weighed against each other. The reconciliation has
been achieved through the logic of market values, weights and measures, in a
simulacrum of trade in the public square; in this way, caritas succumbs to
cupiditas.14 It is the only way that Charles I could even postulate the absurd
proposition of measuring human life against pearls as a remedy for his
confession that the loss of indigenous life weighed so heavily on his
conscience. But, such is the prerogative of the Sovereign. Thus, Petrarch, who
counted himself doubly a sinner for holding Laura higher than treasure and
his God's commandments, can't hold a candle to the sovereign's torment in the
16th century. Charles I’s conscience is entangled in that most imperial of
metaphors: translation.
The eurocentricism of the desire for “terrae incognitae” (but inhabited)
raises the obvious question (unknown to whom?), but it also underscores a
14
Ollman’s inquiry into alienation among capitalists stemmed from his own
experience with entrepreneurship. A heterodox Marxist in the department of Politics
at NYU, Ollman started a company to sell a board game he called Class Struggle. This
experimentation with his own consciousness led to a compelling argument on the
alienation of the capitalist.
83
value to habitation that undercuts the self-proclaimed superiority of European
knowledge: a eurocentricism whose axis of being is centered, paradoxically, on
habitations external to itself.15 Clearly, something was to be gained from
indigenous habitation. How to profit in spiritual and material terms while
making claims that the indigenous also gained from venture capital’s
enterprise added a new layer to the discourse of legitimacy which, as argued in
the first chapter, made recourse to two exceptions: the societas (moral
exception to usury) and free trade and evangelization (geopolitical exception to
jus gentium). What made the “win-win” promise of venture capitalism so
compelling?16
Contingency Plans
By following the itineraries of conquest designed in the Casa de
Contrataciones in Seville and executed in the Islands and Tierra Firme
throughout the sixteenth century, let us delve into the contradictions latent in
imperial injunctions to love and listen. The capitulaciones (contracts) signed
between the Spanish Crown and the commanders of expeditions throughout
the sixteenth century provided the blueprint to the master fable of conquest.17
15
See O’Gorman’s La invención de América and Rabasa’s Inventing America.
Sorcery! (see Pignarre and Stengers).
17 Note that Vas Mingo and Morales Padrón, editors of the capitulaciones, leyes and
ordenanzas consulted for this chapter, dispute the category of “contract” for the
documents that define the obligations of Crown and Crew to each other. They prefer
to analyze the capitulaciones in terms of medieval suzerainty, of services and gifts
exchanged between a liege lord and his loyal subjects. However, their distinction
16
84
In this master fable, the Empire brought civilization and benefits to the lands
inhabited by the weaker other: the sovereign showed his or her love for the
new subjects by protecting the innocent, freeing peoples from the shackles of
bondage and bringing order to chaos; these others were taught the ways of the
good life, including an introduction to Christianity. At the same time, the
Empire and its agents received material profits from the lands of others: in
kind, in labor, geopolitical advantage but also in moral value. In the discourse
of Empire this quid pro quo follows the logic of “love interest,” an over
determined reconciliation of antitheses and unity of purpose among temporal
and spiritual sovereigns, subjects, new and old, financiers and the ever present
enemies and future friends of the State. No longer do cupiditas and caritas
struggle for preeminence within the subject as the subject of venture capital
and empire has forced a synthesis between the two.
Yet from the juxtaposed items in the contracts, which outline debts and
limit obligations, foresee contingencies and distribute profits, the master fable
unravels, exposing loose threads. The Laws seek peace by creating zones of
armed conflict; the Law recognizes local laws and customs (jus gentium) but
only to the extent that these do not conflict with the civilizing mission or the
profit imperative of the Sovereign and his agents. The contracts and laws
underscore and hide anxieties about the moral and material risks at play with
each venture, each intended expansion of the Empire’s reach. Empire accords
between feudal and mercantile relationships, as we saw in the cases of PortugueseGenovese admirals in the first chapter, is overstated.
85
different values to love, charity, and peace but also labor, commodities, titles
and subjects. Even time—which belongs to no one but God—receives a value.
The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed between King John II of Portugal
(r.1481-95) and Isabel of Castile (1474-1504) and Ferdinand of Aragon (14971516) on June 17, 1494, assigned a value to the spiritual life of sovereigns
relative to the Church’s jurisdiction over spiritual life.18 Schmitt’s notorious
definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception” in Political
Theology offers a paradoxical insight into a treaty signed among two temporal
sovereigns and adjudicated by the third, spiritual sovereign. How, then, to
enforce rules of an agreement among three “deciders” of the exception?19
Threats of war and trade sanctions were themselves causes of just war; a treaty
made in good faith, to keep the peace, could involve such means of
enforcement if they were not themselves infractions of the treaty. In the case of
the Treaty of Tordesillas, Pope Alexander VI (r. 1492-1503) made recourse to a
spiritual exception in order to enforce compliance between the two temporal
sovereigns of the Iberian Peninsula.
By tying the hands of the Church in the realm of the monarch’s
consciences, the treaty had a binding effect on the spiritual life of the Iberian
Sovereigns:
18
The Treaty of Tordesillas defines the meridian as 370 miles west of the Cape Verde
Islands. Subsequent Spanish and Portuguese navigators, including Martín Fernández
de Enciso, who brings up the stern in Guamán Poma’s allegory of conquest, attempted
to define the demarcation line in degrees.
19 The echoes of contemporary encounters with another “great decider,” George W.
Bush, undoubtedly reverberate in this reading of the treaty.
86
E contra alguna parte dello e por mayor seguridad e firmeza de lo
susodicho juraron a Dios e a Santa María e a la sennal de la cruz en
que pusieron sus manos derechas e alas palabras de los Santos
Evangelios de los dichos sus constituyentes que ellos y/ cada uno de
ellos ternán e guardarán e cunplirán todo lo suso dicho y cada una
cosa e parte dello realmente e con efeto, çesante todo fraude,
cautela, enganno, ficción e simulaçión e no lo contradirán en tiempo
alguno ni o alguna manera, so el qual dicho juramento juraron de
no pedir absoluçión ni relaxaçión del a nuestro muy santo padre ni a
otro ningund legado, ni perlado que ge la pueda dar e aunque
propio motu ge la den no usarán della, antes por esta presente
capitulaçión suplican en el dicho nonbre a nuestro muy santo padre
que a Su Santidad plega confirmar e aprouar esta dicha capitulaçión
segund en ella se contiene a mandado expedir sobre ello sus bullas a
las partes o a qualquier dellas que las pidieren [... ]
(Tratado de Tordesillas, 60)
And against part of it and for greater surety and security in the
aforementioned [treaty] they swore to God and Saint Mary and
made the sign of the cross and placed their right hands on the Holy
Gospels that they would keep and uphold the aforementioned in
each and every thing effectively, without fraud, machination, ploys,
lies or dissimulations and they will not contradict it at any time or in
any manner, and they swore on that oath not to ask for absolution
or laxity from our Holy Father or any other legate or prelate who
could give it and even if he were to give it of his own accord they are
not to make use of it. By the present treaty they beg of His Holiness
that he confirm and approve this treaty and publish his bulls to each
party mentioned therein and any other party who may so request it.
By swearing on sacred objects to uphold the terms of the treaty, the three
sovereigns formalized the negotiations that had taken place in their absence in
the weeks prior to the actual drawing up and signing of the document on June
17, 1494. Yet the possibility that the Catholic Monarchs and King John II might
foreswear themselves had to be entertained, thus leading to the second oath:
should they break the first oath (to uphold the terms of the treaty), the second
oath forbade the sovereigns from pursuing absolution from the Pope or any
other Church prelate. Even if the Pope or another prelate were to offer
87
absolution of his own accord, the second oath preempted the sinner from
receiving it. But what if He or She were to accept absolution? This would have
implied a breach of the second oath, and so on. The implied concatenation of
oaths, sworn and foresworn, involved a continuous examination of conscience
by each sovereign. It also formalized the attempt to create a binding,
overarching sovereignty out of this performative, dare we say magical,
document.20 The treaty acted as a barrier to absolution in the event that it is
given by any other Catholic prelate; it offered an exception contingent upon
the other sovereign’s exercise of the exception. Yet, like the contradiction
inherent to the search for inhabited unknown lands, another paradox emerged
from Alexander VI’s claim to radical title over the earth.
Paradoxically, the power of the Pope to divide the world in two
undermined the Church's power to intervene in the spiritual terrain at the
highest level: the conscience of the sovereign. Or, rather, it attempted to
enforce through the threat of passivity. The Church and its prelates intervened
in the Sovereigns’ conscience through non-intervention therein. If the
sovereign indeed resides both within and without the law, such a document, in
the area of inter-sovereign enforcement, entailed an abdication—if only formal
and fragmentary—over the Church's absolute power to provide succor in the
20
I use magical with reference to Mauss’s problematic distinction between religion
and magic in his General Theory of Magic. See also Malinowski’s “Magic, Science and
Religion” and Tambiah’s Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality.
All three authors attempt to define magic in contrast with science and religion, and
secret and public practices. Yet such distinctions are rooted in Church doctrine. See
Moore for his argument that all art is magic. It is a compelling argument but it fails to
account for the different pathos elicited by magic and art.
88
face of spiritual death. The terms of the treaty indicate that for a providential
enterprise, ventures in conquista entailed enormous risks, including the
increasing fragmentation of corporate institutions in their pursuit of universal
sovereignty. The treaty’s turn to aporia in the realm of conscience
management, however, also calls into question Schmitt’s definition of the
sovereign as “the decider” of the exception.
The Pope eliminated absolution as a means for enforcing a treaty
between two sovereigns, but only in the matter of exploration and settlement
along the dividing line between Portuguese and Spanish domains. This limited
appeal to the exception retained absolution only in the matter of adherence to
the treaty, nothing more and nothing less. The sharply delimited spiritual “no
man’s land” served as a guarantee to pursue the spiritual and material profits
promised by the three European powers’ shared enterprise in the inhabited
terrae incognitae of the world. Yet this recourse to the exception, as employed
by the highest echelon of the Church hierarchy, would be expanded by the
confessors in defense of the indigenous less than a decade after the
promulgation of the bulls of Alexander VI and Julius I (r. 1503-13) and
ratification of the Treaty of Tordesillas.
The conscience of the sovereign was tied to the habitations of the New
World. For the critics of the conquista, the refusal to provide absolution
became an exception wielded in favor of the oppressed. By decoupling spiritual
and material gains, the value of a clean conscience could no longer be written
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off by the princes of the Church. Accounting for sins, for friends and enemies,
slaves and encomendados, became a habitus codified in law but also an
intellectual crutch in the discourse of conquista itself, and its unrelenting
belief in the transformational power of creative destruction.21
The requerimiento (1512)
This short, thousand word document, reviled and re-written in
relaciones, histories and fiction, declaimed and performed by armed men and
prelates, may be unique to the Spanish experience of imperial expansion but it
belongs, indeed, it inserts itself within the universal expansion of empire.
Accompanied by men bristling with weapons and snarling mastiffs, on or off
21
This should come as no surprise to readers familiar with Derrida's Politics of
Friendship. As he reminds us in his reading of Montaigne and Aristotle, loving and
befriending are actions that create a hierarchy between lover and beloved, friend and
befriended for there is the question of action and passivity or how to make friendship
count. The politics of friendship is not without its accountants for, though "it is
possible to love more than one person, Aristotle seems to concede," Derrida reckons
with the limitations of number in friendship, "to love in number, but not too much
so—not too many" (21). Though boundless love, akin to boundless law, seems an
impossibility yet, Derrida continues,
It is not the number that is forbidden, nor the more than one, but the
numerous, if not the crowd. The measure is given by the act, by the
capacity of loving in act: for it is not possible to be in act (energein),
effectively, actively, presently at the heart of this 'numerous' (pros
pollous), which is more than simple number (ou gar oión te áma pros
pollous energein). A finite being could not possibly be present in act to too
great a number. There is no belonging or friendly community that is
present, and first present to itself, in act, without election and without
selection.
There is an inherent tension between being and loving in the present, but accounting
for the future. In the conquista, the distribution of love presently nonetheless looks to
the future interests of imperial expansion. Moreover, this love—as we shall see with
Carlos I's burdens of conscience—trades in death and slavery (i.e., 'social death') but
protests its ability, indeed its duty, to deny the limitations of love and account for new
subjects and slaves even if, at present, they are enemies to be reckoned with.
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the shores of the Americas, the requerimiento’s “draconian series of speech
acts” reiterated efforts to legitimize and perform possession in the terrible
union of pen and sword that, nevertheless, veered toward the absurd, even
quixotic avant la lettre (Gaylord 88). In the Brevísima relación de la
destrucción de las Indias, Bartolomé de las Casas’s condemnation of the
requerimento’s legitimacy is preceded by emotional appeals to truth, justice
and Christianity: the requerimiento "es una burla de la verdad y de la justicia
y un gran insulto a nuestra fe cristiana y a la piedad y caridad de Jesucristo, y
no tiene ninguna legalidad" “makes a mockery of truth and justice and is a
great insult to our Christian faith and the piety and charity/ love of Jesus
Christ, and has no legal basis (43). 22 The recuperation of caritas qua caritas
in the incendiary pamphlet by La Casas, not only serves to undermine binaries
such as civilization/ barbarism, as argued by Rabasa in Writing Violence, but
also to restore a radical understanding of Christian caritas that cannot be
confused with cupiditas. Who are the real Christians?23
The requerimiento, Guamán Poma de Ayala reminded Felipe III (r.
1598-1621), was a sordid affair. As explored in the Introduction, Guamán
Poma de Ayala undermines the requerimiento’s legitimacy in the Nueva
corónica y buen gobierno by exposing the “backstage” machinations behind its
unhappy reception in Cajamarca: an amorío between the Coya and a mere
22
See Hanke’s “Requerimento” for an apologetics of the document. However, readers
may also wish to consult Gutiérrez’s “Evangelization at Gunpoint” for his response to
charges of anachronism that have been leveled against critics of the requerimiento.
23 A question foregrounded by discussions of empire and capitalism in Negri and
Hardt but also, more recently, by Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11.
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commoner and failed interpreter, Felipillo. Guamán Poma’s recourse to
comparisons between the requerimiento and illegitimate love responds to the
requerimiento’s own promotion of its loving, legitimate intentions toward its
newfound subjects in the Indies. As Roland Greene has argued, the
requerimiento of new subjects to the Spanish Crown shares the rhetoric of the
requerimiento de amores, where the silence and disdain of the Beloved for
(her) Lover’s entreaties emboldens him all the more. By casting itself in the
Lover’s mold, the Spanish imperial venture reinforces the Aristotelian binaries
of strong over weak, man over woman, Lover over Beloved, active over passive,
master over slave, etc. (see 1 Politics). Yet there is something decidedly weak
about the Spaniards who rely on the philandering Felipillo for the purposes of
conquista. As Adorno has remarked, Guamán Poma’s lapidary statement—“no
hubo conquista” “there was no conquest”—offers legal arguments, like Las
Casas, to support his case against the illegitimacy of the Spanish invasion. Yet,
also like Las Casas, Guamán Poma denounces the amoral marriage of love
interest to which the Spanish empire is beholden.
The origins of the requerimiento’s critique can be found within the text
itself. In their redaction of this most performative script, the requerimiento’s
authors, including Palacios Rubios in consultation with Martín Fernández de
Enciso, display a self-reflexive understanding of their own limitations,
especially in their appreciation for the paradox of the document at hand:
“Notificaçión y requerimiento que se ha de hazer a los moradores de las yslas e
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tierra firme del mar Oçeano que aún no están subjetos al rey nuestro señor”
‘notice and requirement that is to be made to the inhabitants of the islands and
mainland who are not yet subject to our lord the king’ (in Morales Padrón
338).24 The intended audience is not yet subject to the sovereign but will be by
the end of the performance; they are but inhabitants of Islands and a
mainland but will become subjects by the power of this requerimiento and
through the representation of the king’s “criado, mensajero y capitán”
‘servant, Messenger and captain.’ The means for contracting new subjects are
imperfect, the text has its messengers acknowledge, but “vos notifico y hago
saber como mejor puedo” ‘I give you notice and will have you know to the best
of my ability.’ This caveat does not exempt the requerimiento’s captive
audience from claims, however well-founded, of ignorance. What follows is an
abbreviated course in Christianity, a Western Civilization 101, if you will, that
seeks to gloss over the fraught question of (in)vincible ignorances when
inviting a new party to undersign a covenant or contract.
The requerimiento proceeds with its history of universal descent from
“un hombre y una mujer, de quien nosotros y vosotros y todos los hombres del
24
Martín Fernández de Enciso, Bachiller, and also a member of Pedrarias Dávila’s
expedition, whose Suma de geografía was published in Seville in 1519. Fernández de
Enciso recounts the reception of the requerimiento among the caciques of Cenú in
order to justify the violence of Pedrarias Dávila’s expedition against the native
inhabitants of the Darien. Las Casas cites the passage in its entirety in the Historia de
las indias (III.53). Even Fernández de Oviedo, another member of the Dávila
expedition, took issue with the requerimiento by his own account (Historia general,
libro 29, cap. 7). Never an advocate for the Indians, his cynical assertion that the
requerimiento presupposed that the Indians had been put in cages, preemptively,
nonetheless rings very true.
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mundo fueron y son descendientes y procreados” ‘one man and one woman
from whom we and you and all the men of the world were and are
descendants’ and offers an explanation for how these generations of humanity
were dispersed throughout the world, leading to their division into different
“kingdoms and provinces”: it could not be otherwise, “que en una sola no se
podrían sostener ni conservar” ‘for they could not subsist in one sole area.’
This explanation for the emergence of differing and distinct peoples with their
own customs and laws for self-rule is similar to the arguments offered by José
de Acosta in favor of free trade but in reverse.
Writing in the latter half of the 16th century, Acosta will argue that the
dispersion of the human race around the world makes free trade a moral and
universal imperative:
Iam vero mercaturae artis hoc propriam est, ut quae apud suos
abundant, deferant ad externos, & quibus vicissum illi
circunfluunt, reportentsuis. Ita enim comunis nostris generis
autor mortales omnes interse sociandos & quodam communion
in officio retinendos existimauit, si sibi essent vicissim opportuni
& commodi.
Furthermore, it is part of the nature of commerce to carry to
foreigners what we have much of, and what is superfluous to
their needs for them to bring it to us. Thus it pleased the
common Author of mankind for all mortals to associate
themselves in this manner and to maintain themselves in unity
through mutual communication, so that they might be of mutual
help and advantage one to another.
(De procuranda indorum salute II. xiii)
The free trade doctrine is not further elaborated in the requerimiento but
alluded to in the enumeration of benefits promised in return for peaceful
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subjugation: the entrance into a neighborhood of subjects, like those of other
isles, “vecinos de las otras yslas,” who have converted and received, in
exchange from the Crown, privileges “privilegios,” exemptions “esençiones,”
and gifts “mercedes” (Morales Padrón 339). The diversity of habitats and the
riches of each land necessitates the free commerce of goods and peoples. At
the same time, the common origin of mankind, dispersed, obligates a univocal
leadership: San Pedro, “para que de todos los hombres del mundo fuese señor
e superior, a quienes todos ovedesçiesen e fuesen cabeça de todo el linaje
umano donde quier que los hombres viviesen y estuviesen, y en qualquier ley,
seta o creencia y diole a todo el mundo por su reyno señorío y juridiçión” ‘so
that he would be the overlord of all humankind, to be obeyed by all and to lead
the human race wheresover humans live and inhabit, and in whichever law,
sect or belief and he gave the whole world for his kingdom and jurisdiction’
(338). As in the exposition of free trade, the customs and laws (jus gentium)
are subject to a universal imperative. Conspicuously absent is Christ himself in
this formula for worldwide Christian empire.
Why should St. Peter’s preeminence be so self-evident? Only a few lines
earlier the text mentions that humankind could not subsist as one, in one
place, that diversity of livelihood and customs made sense within the divine
plan for humankind. That claim to universal dominion rests on an unspoken,
but necessary, analogy to the unifying imperative of trade. The requerimiento
omits Christ, though Christians are just another item under the litany of
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peoples under the Pope’s jurisdiction (including ‘Moors,’ ‘Jews,’ ‘Gentiles and
any other sect or belief’). Moreover, this move toward centralized power in the
“silla en Roma” ‘seat in Rome’ stakes a claim to any place on earth where it
“pudiese estar y poner su silla en qualquier otra parte del mundo” ‘could reside
and place his seat in any other part of the world’ (339). The universal
jurisdiction of the Pope paradoxically undermines the modus operandi of lawmaking and of the sacred, a theme explored in the third chapter, that depends
on meaningful demarcation and signification through metonymy.25 Yet a world
of immanent domain where all is demarcated is also a world in which nothing
is demarcated; lawless and without the sacred, almost meaningless, the power
of the Pontifical World stakes a claim by gesturing toward the foundational
violence of the law. This works to the benefit of empire, but also exposes one of
its greatest weaknesses: immanence does not easily translate into eminence. A
stake, or a banner, the empresa is driven into the ground to mark the
ontological claim to estar (to be) here, in this place inhabited by others. Does a
universal delineation of the law permit the possibility of thinking without it?
25
One could say that the Geotheology of Stakes began with the Treaty of Tordesillas. I
borrow the term, ‘geotheology,’ from the cultural geographer John Kirtland Wright, to
describe the general relationship between space and the worship of god(s). As
delineated in the Bulls of Donation and in the requerimiento, Christianity declares all
of the world sacred for the Pope, whose seat is in Rome, and who could move it to any
place he wished. As Tuan contends, the “long term effects of Christian doctrine was to
denude nature of its spirits and mystery” (26). Effectively, by declaring that the entire
world was sacred it erased the sacred, since sacer is a legal term to denote the process
by which a place has been given over to the deity, under the authority of the state (17).
By staking a claim to all of the earth, Christianity paradoxically denied the power of
stake holding, of the nomos, and the delimitation of sacer from what is not sacer.
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After declaring universal jurisdiction, the requerimiento takes pains to
demarcate the earth once more, this time to explain the Papal Bull of
Alexander VI. It is less than a decade old. The script for conquista covers more
than ‘five thousand years,’ but the phrasing does not acknowledge the relative
novelty of the event to the narrative’s intended audience. Instead, there is a
timelessness to it, an effort not to pinpoint the year in which Papal Bulls were
promulgated or treaties signed among two Sovereigns on the same peninsula:
Uno de los Pontífiçes passados que en lugar deste suçedió en
aquella silla […] hizo donaçión destas yslas y tiera firme del mar
Oçéano a los dichos Rey y Reyna y a sus subçessores en estos
reynos […] segund se contiene en ciertas escripturas que sobre
ellos pasaron […] que podeys ver si quisieredes.
One of the past pontiffs who took [this one’s, i.e. St. Peter’s]
place in that seat […] made a donation of these islands and
Mainlands of the Ocean to the King and Queen and their
successors in those kingdoms […] as witnessed by these
documents […] that you may see if you so choose.
The offer to demonstrate the legitimacy of the papal donation by showing
notarized copies of the papal bulls and treaties is worthy of the derision that
subsequent commentators have shown it, given the obvious limitations in
communication between the Crown’s representatives and their native
interlocutors. What slips through the cracks of righteous condemnation,
however, is a demonstration of humanists’ productive use of sacred history.
So much is achieved by this abbreviation in time between St. Peter and
Alexander VI, almost as if Rubios and Encinas could perform a temporal
sleight of hand. Perhaps the authors of the text would like to believe in its
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veracity, by relegating it to mythological, primordial time of the world’s origins
under Adam and Eve or even the pontificate’s founding with St. Peter in
classical antiquity. It is a rhetorical feat, similar to the narratives of forgery
attributed to Michelangelo and other humanists in the Lives of Artists (1550)
by Giorgio Vasari (1511-74).26 Who is that pontiff who made the donation? One
of ‘those past pontiffs who succeeded the other one [Peter].’ When? Like other
Renaissance men eager to pass off their own sculptures as recently excavated
treasures to gullible antiquities dealers, the authors readily proffer these
documents from some remote, yet so novel, so recent, past, and marvel at their
own skill, so proximate to the ancient model. The lack of details, the
abbreviations, omissions, the gaps in information—like an arm or a nose
broken off a marble figure of a deity no longer venerated or a text truncated
mid-paragraph—only serve to lend the foundational myth and this most recent
historical artifact more validity. They are, after all, one of the Crown’s own
letters addressed “to posterity.”
Gaining steam from the manufactured antiquities offered, caveat
emptor, the reasons for submitting to the ‘aforementioned King and Queen’
are as numerous as all the neighbors who have already submitted to their
26
The superiority of the humanist’s knowledge and connoisseurship—of authorship,
provenance and history when coupled with erudition and skill at imitation—hangs in
the balance. The dominio of the artist and the humanist allow them to perform
secular miracles, whose secrets are known only to a select few. See Lorenzo Valla
(1407-57) for the other side of the coin in On the Donation of Constantine (1439-40).
Valla uses philology and observations of human character to debunk the authenticity
of the Church’s claims to legitimate power. The humanist positions himself as the
ultimate arbiter in the ordering of history.
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dominion, following a reading of the requerimiento just like this one: “con
buena voluntad y sin ninguna resistençia” ‘with good will and without
resistance.’ Yet the rush to sign the deal “sin dilaçión” ‘without delay’
underscores the fragility of the named and unnamed authorities of the
proffered narrative. Neighboring inhabitants provide compelling examples of
Christian empire’s benefits. Those who have accepted the missionaries in their
midst were received by their Sovereigns ‘happily and benignly’ “alegre y
benignamente.”
The requerimiento’s interlocutors at present are urged to follow suit, by
taking the necessary or fair amount of time to “entenderlo y deliberar sobre
ello el tiempo que fuere justo” ‘to understand and deliberate on it for the justo
[exact, precise, fair] amount of time.’ The document’s insistence on a precise
measurement of time to permit meaningful consent incorporates another
value—time—into the proposed exchange with the indigenous. The units of
tiempo justo become yet another currency in the moral and material economy
of love interest, in the allusions to the dangers of temporal excess. Let us recall
that one of the arguments against charging interest (i.e. lucrum cessans),
analyzed at greater length in the first chapter, was that humanity could not
charge for something (time) over which it held no ownership rights. The
requerimiento makes no claim to ‘giving’ or ‘bestowing’ enough time to
deliberate the weighty matter of submission to Pope and Crown. However, as
the document alludes to a precise allotment of time for deliberation, just
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enough to be fair and legal (justo), it makes a temporal incursion, fraught with
moral peril, into the realm of the sacer.
Soon thereafter the requerimiento invokes pursuit of malicious delay
(“en ello dilación maliciosamente pusierdes”) in indigenous deliberations as a
cause for just war. Willing submission ensures incorporation (“vos recibirán”)
by the Sovereigns with “todo amor y caridad,” ‘much love and charity,’
including a promise to freedom from servitude and recognition of existing
property rights as well as privileges, exemptions and gifts. Conversion is an
option, not an obligation, though, as we saw in the earlier clause, there is an
obligation to listen to preachers.
Refusal to submit or malicious delay incurs the full wrath and power at
the speaker’s disposal, who threatens to do “vos haré todos los males e daños
que pudiere” ‘all the evil and harm that I am able to do’: all out war, the yoke
of the Church and State, enslavement, and seizure of property (340).
Moreover, the fault and the guilt for these malicious actions—defined as such
by the speaker, as intended to do the maximum harm and destruction
possible—are your own “sean a vuestra culpa.” In this imagined scene of total
and utter devastation, there remains a modicum to be transferred from one
party (yo) to the other (vosotros): guilt and liability.
Despite the protestations on the “free will” of the native interlocutors to
accept or deny submission to the Crown in the requerimiento, with all its
attendant consequences, a close reading of the contract signed between
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Pedrarias Dávila and Ferdinand of Aragon reveals the predetermined nature of
encomendados and esclavos. As stipulated in the contract for the joint
venture, the “choice” for the indigenous, slavery or encomienda, was
predetermined and, thus, a counterfeit of war. Slaves, as Orlando Patterson
contends, live the paradox of social death, for that is the life and place of
slavery within the social compact. Encomendados, the indigenous who provide
tribute in labor and in goods to the conquistadors in exchange for Christian
tutelage, submit to the slow deaths of their former selves in the process of
ethno-suicide. War, as Negri and Derrida, among other authors, have
contended allows for no decision-making. The itinerary for war and slave or
subject making, as argued below, navigates the “free will” among the residents
of neighboring isles with all haste as their fates—slaves or encomendados—
were already cast.
The Laws of Burgos (1512)
A reading of the contract, signed between Pedrarias Dávila and
Ferdinand of Arafon "para poblar e paçificar " ‘to settle and pacify’ the
Darién, offers the mercantile framework within which the requerimiento
would be performed and the Leyes de Burgos, passed on December 27, 1512,
applied to labor and spiritual exchanges (known as the encomienda).27 As
27
Las Casas traces the origin of the encomienda system to a misreading of a letter
written by Isabel of Castile days before her death. The letter itself, reproduced by Las
Casas in chapter fourteen of the third book of his Historia de las indias is discussed at
greater length in the third chapter. Andre Saint-Lu omits Isabel’s letter in his edition
of the Historia de las indias, but it is included in earlier, nineteenth century editions
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alluded to in the earlier section on exceptions to absolution in the Treaty of
Tordesillas, critics of the conquista widened the exception to create a blanket
denial to absolution as a spiritual bludgeon wielded in favor of the oppressed.
Following the sermon by fray Antonio de Montesinos (d. 1545) the joint
venture in the West Indies between Church and State experienced a crisis of
legitimacy. The Laws of Burgos were scripted, in part, to respond to this crisis
in fama and in faith. In the sermon, Montesinos condemned the encomienda
and the encomenderos to a life without absolution. His refusal, and that of
other Dominicans, to give the sacraments of confession and absolution to
encomenderos would become the modus operandi for indigenous advocacy
among the religious in the Indies. We do not have the full text of the sermon,
only remnants from its gut wrenching refrain—soy la voz que clama en el
desierto (I am the voice crying out in the wilderness)—that allowed
Montesinos to take on the mantle of John the Baptist. One of the young
encomenderos who answered his call to conversion from a life of usury and
sin, the future fray Bartolomé de las Casas, gives a harrowing account of his
awakening to the suffering of the Indians in his Historia de las Indias (III.ivv). Following Christian precepts on fair exchange values, not only did
Montesinos claim that the integrity of missionary work in the Indies was at
stake, but also the moral status of the labor and spiritual exchanges
(encomienda system). Yet, as examined in greater detail in the third chapter,
of the work, as well as in the volumes dedicated to the Historia in the edition of Obras
completas under the direction of Castañeda Delgado and Huerga.
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free trade and missionary work were reason enough to justify Spanish ventures
in the West Indies. However, since labor, especially manual labor, required
remuneration to avoid usury, the Crown and the encomenderos had to give
something of value in exchange for indigenous labor. The Laws of Burgos
itemize the items and exchange values in greater detail than in any earlier legal
code written for the purpose of managing conquista in the Americas.
The Laws of Burgos propose remedies to reform the labor and spiritual
exchange. The tenth law, for example, urges clergy to provide the sacraments
of confession to the Indians and to bury their dead "sin por ello llevar interés
alguno" ‘without profiting from it.’ The indigenous must be taught Catholic
doctrine "con mucho amor y dulzura" ‘with much love and sweetness’;
encomenderos who failed to uphold their duty to catechize would be fined six
pesos, or units of gold. These pesos would be distributed equally between the
Sovereign’s treasury, the accuser and the sentencing judge. Other laws
regulated, ordering times for rest and types of work, i.e. pregnant women
received a reprieve from manual labor (eighteenth law); local customs such as
the areitos were to be permitted (fourteenth law). Other laws that required the
distribution of one hammock per Indian (nineteenth law), and meat on
Sundays and other holidays sought to ensure basic living conditions (fifteenth
law).28 However, the Crown also required that one third of all encomendados
28
Much more could be said about the regulation and demarcation of time for the
purposes of venture capitalism in these laws and those of the 1526 Ordenanzas, as
well as the New Laws (1542). For a compelling account of the homogenizing effects of
industrial capitalism in England, see Thirst. He argues that workers replaced, that is,
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serve in the mines, which was, in effect, a death sentence (twenty fifth law).29
Moreover, though some instances of jus gentium, such as the areitos, were to
be tolerated, others, such as marital and sexual practices, and the perceived
lack of suitable attire were not. For example, indigenous elites (caciques and
their wives) were to dress as befitted their station; polygyny and
homosexuality were outlawed and punishable by death. That many chose exile
in the monte (i.e., to live as outlaws) and death over the life regulated by the
exchanges of the encomienda system was related in great detail by Las Casas
but also alluded to in Ferdinand of Aragon’s preamble to the Laws of Burgos.
Therein the Spanish regent laments the great distances separating the
encomendados from the encomenderos, a physical distance that had to be
bridged in order to ensure “conversión continua” (continuous and contiguous
conversion) (in Morales Padrón 311).
Laws thirteen and twenty-seven, however, provide the exception to the
labor and spiritual exchange and underscore the tenuous distinction between
social life and death in the new colonies. Slaves need not enjoy the benefits of
the temporal division between work and rest. Law twenty-seven displays some
confusion about the exception that seems to prove the rule. The encomenderos
destroyed, their own consciousness of time—seasonal labor, social events, tasks—with
the owners' time, a “future oriented calculative rationality” (567). See also Kuriyama’s
“The enigma of ‘time is money” for an engaging reflection on the relationship between
capital, time and consciousness in a non-modern society, Meiji Japan, in particular, in
the process of learning Western ways.
29 Las Casas has a close reading of the Laws of Burgos in the Historia de las Indias
that is devastating (II. xvi-xviii).
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had to follow the guidelines for the equitable distribution of time (labor and
rest) and resources (material and spiritual) for their encomendados, unless
their encomendados were slaves. This slippage reveals some confusion in the
law as to the treatment and identities of slaves and encomendados, even if the
text of the requirimiento, as analyzed above, would seem to offer a clear option
between the two statuses. Work and rest must be distributed for the
encomendados in keeping with the law,
Salvo si los tales indios fueren esclavos, porque a estos tales cada
uno cuyos fueren los puede tratar como él quisiere, pero
mandamos que no sea con aquella riguridad y aspereza que
suelen tratar a los otros esclavos, sino con mucho amor y
blandura para mejor inclinarlos en las cosas de nuestra fe.
(Ley veinte y siete, Morales Padrón 323)
Unless these Indians [brought from other neighboring islands]
are slaves, because these can be treated as each [encomendero]
so chooses, but we order that they be treated not with the rigor
and harshness with which the other slaves are treated, but with
much love and leniency so as to persuade them in the matters of
our faith.
Slavery, or social death, provides the exception to the rules of the encomienda.
Slaves brought from the other islands “los puede tratar como él quisiere” ‘can
be treated as [each encomendero] so chooses.’ However, a distinction should
be made between these slaves and “los otros esclavos” ‘the other slaves’ who
the law acknowledges are treated with “riguridad y aspereza” ‘great rigor and
harshness.’ We can infer that mention of the ‘other slaves’ refers to the peoples
brought from Africa, and they are the exception to the exception of the
encomienda system. Even within the binary of colonial thought and practice,
105
another Manichean distinction along the fault lines of race and geo-spatial
provenance emerges.
The Contract between Pedrarias Dávila and Ferdinand of Aragon (1513)
The laws of Burgos arrived in Santo Domingo with three members of
the order of St. Jerome in December 1516. They were put into practice,
however, as early as 1513 when Pedrarias Dávila, fifteen ships and over two
thousand men and women set sail for the Darién peninsula in what is now
Colombia. This contract between Ferdinand of Aragon and Dávila stipulated
the erasure of the area’s indigenous name, “a la tierra que se solía llamar
[ilegible]” ‘the land that used to be called [illegible]’ (Morales Padrón 89). The
new name would reflect back on Castile in the hues of the monarchy’s most
prized commodity: “la mandamos llamar Castilla aurífera” ‘we order [it] to be
called Golden Castille’ (89). What follows is an itinerary for slave making and
selling; making “new subjects” and “pacifying” them. A cartography of human
habitation receives an itinerary so that the requerimiento may be put into
practice. This section is worth quoting at great length and begins with the
Spanish Sovereign delineating the stops to be made before reaching the
Darién. Ferdinand of Aragon routes Dávila’s enterprise accordingly:
Derrota derecha para la provincia del Darién i sin estorvo ni
tardança del viaje lo pudierdes fazer aveys de tocar en las yslas de
los Canibales que son isla fuerte Baru San Vernaldo, Santa Crus,
Gayra, Cartajena, Caramari, Codego que están dados por esclavos
106
por razón que comen carne humana y por el mal y dapno que han
fecho a nuestra gente y por el que fazen a los otros indios de las
otras yslas y a los otros vasallos y a la gente que destos reynos
avemos enviado a poblar en aquellas partes y por mas justificaçión
nuestra sy hallardes manera de poderles requerir los requirir que
vengan a la ovediençia de la iglesia y sean nuestros vasallos y si no
lo quisieren fazer o no lo pudierdes requirir aveys de tomar todos
los que pudierdes y enviarlos en vn navio a la ysla Española y allí se
entreguen a Miguel de Pasamonte nuestro tesorero y a los otros
nuestros oficiales para que se vendan y el navío que con ellos fuere
os ha de llevar lo que de la dicha Ysla Española se oviere de llevar a
la dicha Castilla aurífera y por todas las otras partes que pasardes
especialmente en qualquier parte que tocardes en la costa de la
dicha tierra aveys de escusar que en ninguna manera se faga dapño
a los indios por que no se escandalizen ni alboroten de los
christianos antes les hazed muy buena compañía y buen tratamiento
porque corra la nueba tierra adentro y con ella vos resçiban y
vengan a comunicaros y en conosçimiento de las cosas de la nuestra
santa fee católica que es a lo que principalmente os enviamos y
deseamos que se açierte. (90)
Make straight for the Darien without stopping or delaying travel
and, if possible, land on the islands of the Cannibals, which are the
islands of Baru San Vernaldo, Santa Crus, Gayra, Cartajena,
Caramari, Codego. [The cannibals] are given as slaves because they
eat human flesh and for the damages they have done to our people
and [the damage] done to the Indians of other islands and the other
subjects and the people we have sent from our realms [.] If you are
able to summon them [requerirles] subdue them so that they may
obey the Church and be our subjects but if they do not wish to
[obey] or you are unable to subdue them you are to take as many of
them as you can and send them in a boat to the Española and hand
them over to Miguel de Pasamonte, our treasurer, and to our other
officials so that they will be sold [.] Then use that same boat [used
for the slave trade between the Cannibal islands and Española] to
take whatever [materials, resources] are needed to the
aforementioned Golden Castille and in all the other places you pass
through. Especially if you are on the coast of that aforementioned
land [i.e., Golden Castille] you should take care not to do any
damage to the Indians so that they are not shocked and do not riot
against the Christians [.] Instead, show companionship and treat
them well so that rumors flow inland and with them you shall be
[well] received and they will come to communicate with you and in
the knowledge of the matters of our holy catholic faith which is your
primary reason for being sent and we wish you success.
107
The instructions given to Dávila seem contradictory and plagued by the
confusion of causes for effects, or metalepsis. On the one hand, he should take
the shortest route possible to the Darién, without delay. On the other, he must
stop at the “Cannibal islands” to capture ‘cannibals who are given as slaves’ for
the crimes of ‘eating human flesh,’ attacking other Indians and the Spanish
king's subjects, and for loss of life and property. However, though the text had
already instructed that the cannibals should be taken as slaves, they also
should be given the chance to submit to the Crown (as part of the performance
of the requerimento, more on that below). Finally, the contract foresees the
logistics for the transport and sale of the human cargo in Santo Domingo.
That slave ship is then to be filled with other cargo and destined for the
Darién, which is to be called ‘Golden Castille’ and the peoples found there will
also be offered the choices of the requerimiento (submission or slavery).
There, the Spanish Sovereign anticipates their willing submission if his soonto-be subjects are shown companionship and are well treated by his current
subjects, thus making them more amenable to evangelization efforts. At the
same time, the King contends that failure to treat these new subjects in a
‘loving manner’ will result in escándalos and alborotos, scandals or riots.30
This emphasis on irrational rebellion speaks to the circular logic of the
foundational violence at the heart of this entrepreneurial program, which Las
30
The reliance on rumor to woo subjects in absentia falls squarely within the courtly
love tradition which, as De Rougement contends, is also indebted to Jewish and
Muslim mystics and the Greek understanding of the workings of eros through sight
and rumor.
108
Casas would later refute in his Brevíssima relación (1552) with the caustic
observation that people raising arms to defend themselves cannot be called
rebels if they were never subjects in the first place; “que ninguno es ni puede
considerarse rebelde si primero no es súbdito” ‘that nobody is or can be
considered a rebel if he is not a subject in the first place’ (112). The contract
positions the decision making power of the indigenous in a sequence of
ramifications, functioning like the “decision tree” in corporate manuals and
imperial bureaucracies.31 The ultimate goal is to homogenize actions when
faced with multiplying branches of uncertainty. However, profit motive is the
ultimate horizon for this highly scripted behavior.
The details of profit distribution among the general and lesser partners
of the joint venture immediately follow the itinerary of enslavement. The
fourth item specifies that the Monarch should receive “las dos partes” ‘the two
parts’ of the booty taken on land and at sea in addition to the “quinto
ordinario” ‘regular fifth,’ i.e., twenty percent from the ships that he has
outfitted with his capital, i.e. “puestos los caxcos.” However, in ships outfitted
by other investors, the Monarch will receive the “ordinary fifth.” The
distribution of wealth from those ships’ agents will follow the customs of booty
distribution among the armada ‘land armies’ and marineros ‘sailors’ (89). The
King will provide for the salary of the bishop and clergymen for ten years or
once they start tithing the native population, whichever comes first (90-91).
31
Unity of action in the face of ramifications characterizes bureaucracy in its efforts to
limit decisions (From Max Weber 196-240).
109
The first conquistadors of the Darién (Ojeda, Nicuesa and Martín Fernández
de Enciso) will be made vecinos of Castilla de Oro; so, too, would Francisco
Pizarro (c. 1471-1541) several years later. Then, as another item, among several
others, the requerimiento is paraphrased and glossed once more:32
Y en caso que por esta vía no quisieren venir a nuestra ovediençia y
se les oviere de fazer guera aveys de mirar que por ninguna cosa se
les faga fuera no seyendo ellos los agresores [...]
And if they should not wish to show obedience to us and war must
be waged, you must take care that under no circumstances should
war be waged unless they are the aggressors. (92)
Ferdinand of Aragon anticipates the possibility of refusal but adds that
aggression should be employed only as a means of self-defense. He appeals to
legal forms, including the new laws of Burgos that Dávila should make public
upon his arrival to the Indies. Following the legal formalities, Ferdinand of
Aragon engages in a candid discussion of the inherent conflict of interest
between slave taking and encomienda making:
Les dareys primero a entender el bien que les verná de ponerse
devaxo de nuestra obediencia y mal y dapño y muertes de onbres
que les verna de guerra especialmente que los que se tomaren en
ella vivos han de ser esclavos y que desto tengan entera noticia y que
no pueden pretender ynorançia porque para que lo puedan ser y los
christianos los puedan tener sin su sana conçiençia esta todo el
fundamento en lo suso dicho [...] (93)
First you will have them understand the good that will come to them
by submitting to us and the wrongs and damage and deaths of men
that will come from war [.] Especially, since those who will be taken
alive are destined to be slaves[.] They should be fully informed of
this so that they cannot feign ignorance of what they could
32
These items include recommendations to avoid making promises that cannot be
kept to the Indians, injunctions against gambling, regulations on inheritance, and the
grains to be cultivated in Castilla Aurífera.
110
become[,] and so that Christians may take them with a clear
conscience the grounds reside in the aforementioned [laws].
From this passage we can infer that Ferdinand of Aragon believes death is
preferable to slavery. He also hurries through the fraught doctrine of invincible
and vincible ignorances and nescience. Briefly, invincible ignorance in Catholic
theology refers to the knowledge that an individual has no way of obtaining,
and thus provides an exemption from the sin otherwise committed, whereas
vincible ignorance refers to a lack of knowledge that any rational person could
obtain if they applied themselves to it; in secular law, the axiom ignorantia
juris non excusat ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse [for breaking it]’ bears
some similarity to the doctrine of vincible ignorance. Ferdinand’s haste recalls
the value placed on the distinction between “tiempo justo” and malicious delay
in the requerimiento, a distinction that in itself anticipates shared knowledge,
customs and time frames for decision making.
The requerimiento's summary introduction to Christianity and the
papal donation would provide the fodder for discussions of invincible and
vincible ignorances and the relationship between the temporal and spiritual
powers of the Church and State for years to come. Ferdinand, however,
chooses to gloss over the ignorance of his soon-to-be subjects with the more
readily vincible ignorance of his actual subjects:
aveys de estar sobre aviso de una cosa que todos los christianos por
que los indios se les encomienden tienen mucha gana que sean de
guerra y que no sean de paz y que siempre han de hablar en este
propósito y avnque non se pueda escusar de no le platicar con ellos
es vien estar avisado desto para el crédito que en ello se les debe dar
111
y parece aca que el mas sano pareçer para esto será el del reverendo
fray Juan de Quevedo obispo de el Darién y de los clérigos que están
mas sin pasión y con menos esperança de aver dellos ynteresse.
You must be forewarned of one thing [:] that all Christians prefer
that the the Indians to be given to them in encomienda be of the
warring and not peaceful [type] and always speak to this purpose[.]
And though not speaking to them cannot be excused in any way it is
good to be warned of this for the credit that must be done to them
[.] Here it seems that the most wholesome person for this
[judgment] is reverend friar Juan de Quevedo, bishop of Darién and
other members of the clergy who are less impassioned and have less
hope for the interest to be obtained thereof.
The contract displays the cognitive and legal difficulties involved in
establishing use value and property value in venture capital schemes, as
analyzed in the earlier discussions of the Scholastic treatment of usury vs. sea
voyage partnerships, or loans, and the societas in general in the first chapter.
It also demonstrates greater familiarity, comfort even, with the temporal
paradoxes of venture capital.33
Charles I's Burdens of Conscience and the Capitulaciones signed with
Francisco Pizarro (1526)
The preamble to the 1526 Ordenanzas famously refer to Charles I's
“cargo de consciencia” ‘burdens of conscience’ that are charged to the “Codicia
33
The Capitulaciones of Santa Fe, the contract signed between Christopher Columbus
and Isabel of Castile before the first voyage in 1492, display an outright contradiction
in the relationship between what has been discovered and the voyage to be made:
“Las cosas suplicadas e que Vuestras Altezas dan e otorgan a don Christoval de Colón,
en alguna satisfacion de lo que ha descubierto en las Mareas Oceanas y del viage, con
la ayuda de Dios ha de fazer por ellas en servicio de Vuestras Altezas, son las que
siguen” (emphases mine, Morales Padrón 54). Later documents show consistency in
the use of the periphrastic future tense that also functions as an imperative.
112
desordenada” ‘unruly Greed’ displayed by many of his subjects in the
Americas. These phrases are later reiterated in the so-called Leyes nuevas of
1542. Though Ferdinand had not used these catch phrases to refer to the
frenzy for gold, pearls and especially labor in the Americas, he did show
concern for conquistadors’ interest in making slaves over subjects, hence the
recourse to the Bishop for his arbitration over the decisions to make war. In
other words, Ferdinand attempted to organize cupidity or ‘bridle greed’
preemptively: first, by emphasizing the attitudes of love and companionship
that Dávila and his cohort were to show to his new subjects in the Darién;
second, by engaging the arbitration of a third party—the Church—which did
not have as much profit motive, in material terms, from the final status of the
indigenous (i.e., encomendados or slaves). In November 1526,Charles I
followed his predecessor’s example and underscored the role of the Church as
moral policeman in law and contractual agreements. Charles I places a greater
emphasis on brotherly love as the mechanism to hold in check the appetites of
his unruly subjects and business partners. Yet this greater emphasis on love
does not implicate lesser violence, just a more efficient (or disciplined, to cite
the terminology of Charles I) use of it.
Remedies are set in place to investigate and punish “culpa de muertes y
esclavitud indebidas” ‘guilt for improper or wrongful deaths or enslavements’
and Charles I turns to clergy for their arbitration on these matters (Morales
Padrón 375). References to improper or wrongful deaths or slavery would
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imply that there exist rightful and proper deaths or enslavements, as
articulated in the requerimiento. Along the same lines, Charles I's concern for
his new Christian subjects (the encomendados) is reflected in the injunction
prohibiting their return to their old homes “aunque ellos lo quieran” ‘even if
they desire it’ in order that “se aparten de sus vicios” ‘they be separated from
their vices’ by living within the encomienda system (376-8). Like Ferdinand's
instructions to Dávila, the sixth and ninth ordenanzas of 1526 similarly
paraphrase the requerimiento and its procedure for making new subjects or
new slaves. The prohibition against opening new mines similarly allows for an
exception, at the discretion of clergy, but stipulates that miners should be
treated “as free persons” (ninth and tenth laws). However, as is made clear in
the eleventh law, “new Christians” are subject to the encomienda system and,
thus, could be forced to reside near the mines and work for the mines within
the paradigm of encomienda, the labor for catechism exchange.
Charles I's capitulaciones signed with Francisco Pizarro in July 1529
show a concern for proper procedure with regard to creating “disciplined
greed.” Thus, he commends Pizarro, a vecino of Castilla de Oro, and Diego de
Almagro, a vecino of Panama, for obtaining the permission of Pedrarias
Dávila, the Governor, before leaving for the coast of the Southern Sea in order
to ‘conquer, discover and pacify.’ Moreover, the costs incurred by Pizarro,
Almagro and their cohort during this first expedition would not be reimbursed
by the Crown (233). According to the contract, Pizarro et al. spent 30,000
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pesos in gold and would continue with the enterprise “con el deseo de nos
servir” ‘by serving us’ but at no expense to the Crown. The conquista would be
done “a vuestra costa e mission syn que en ningund tiempo seamos obligados a
vos pagar ny satisfazer lo que en ellos fizieredes mas de lo que en estas
capitulaciones vos fuera otorgado” ‘at your cost and liability; we are under no
obligation to pay or reimburse you for anything more than what is stipulated
in this contract’ (234). What follows is the famous delimitation of Pizarro's
governorship from Tensinpulla to Chincha and items detailing how salaries of
functionaries were to be paid from the distribution of lands and labor to be
conquered.
Pizarro is instructed on creating positions for mayor, squires, peons, a
doctor and a pharmacist. Four fortresses are to be constructed for
“pacification” purposes and at the conquistadors’ own expense. In fact, the
document goes to great lengths to specify that neither Charles I or his heirs are
obligated to pay for construction or upkeep of these fortresses. However, the
Crown does give the monies to pay for artillery and ammunitions, which would
be disbursed at the Casa de Contrataciones in Seville (237). The Sovereign
includes exemption from some tariffs (alcabalas) on imports and exports for a
ten-year period as an incentive to the conquistadors. Moreover, the “ordinary
fifth” will apply to all wealth gained from mines, trade and mounted raids
(minas, rescates y cabalgadas) (235). Some mercedes (gifts) bestowed on the
conquering party include titles of lesser nobility (to be hidalgos de solar
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conocido) and to keep their rights to land and labor in Castilla de Oro or to sell
them if they so choose (236-7).
Yet there are some items that concern our larger discussion of
enslavement and encomienda. Item nineteen refers to the Crown's gift of
African slaves who are ‘free of all rights’ to be traded in the Caribbean en route
to Peru. The Crown will deduct their worth from its own treasury:
Otrosy vos daremos licencia como por la presente vos la damos para
que destos nuestros Reynos o del Reynos de Portugal e yslas de cabo
verde o de donde vos o quien vuestro poder oviere quisieredes e por
bien tovieredes podays pasar e paseys a la dicha tierra de vuestra
governación cinquenta esclavos negros en que aya a lo menos el
tercio hembras libres de todos derechos A nos pertenscientes con
tanto que si los dexarades todos o partes dellos en las yslas española
san Juan y cuba e Santiago o en castilla del oro o en otra parte
alguna los que dellos ansy dexaredes sean perdidos e aplicados e por
la presente los aplicamos a nuestra camara e fisco. (238)
We give you license in this present document so that you or whoever
has your power of attorney may take fifty slaves free of all rights (of
which at least one third will be women), which belong to us from
our realms or the realms of Portugal and the Cape Verde Islands or
wherever you wish, to the lands of your governorship [Peru.] So that
if you leave them all or in part on the islands of Hispaniola, San
Juan, Cuba and Santiago or in Castilla del Oro or somewhere else
they will be applied as a loss, as they are applied now to our own
chamber and treasury.
Charles I treats the slavery of Africans as a gift that could be written off with
the precision of an accountant ensuring that his books are in order. Item
twenty-five then makes a references to the 1526 Ordenanzas for procedures
regarding the Indians and the encomiendas.
116
Despite the concerns for the Sovereign's conscience elaborated in the
1526 laws, the contract between Charles I and Pizarro et al. that was written
within their legal framework hardly makes any reference to the Crown's new
subjects. This may be due to the Sovereign's explicit approval for Pizarro's
modus operandi in the initial venture and experience on the Isla del Gallo.
Unlike Cortés, who had no initial contract with Ferdinand or Charles I, neither
Pizarro, his brothers, or Almagro had shown any signs of insubordination or
intent to commit regicide. As vecinos of good standing in Castilla de Oro, they
all had experience with the requerimento. The contract's main concern was to
organize expectations, profit margins and motives in greater detail and refer
back to labor regulation as a framework with which all parties seemed to be
largely familiar. Unlike Ferdinand of Aragon’s contract with Dávila, which had
to include mechanisms for introducing new law into the colony as part of the
venture agreement, this contract largely took most items related to the
indigenous, especially the script of the requerimento, for granted by and large.
The Conscience of the Sovereign
Charles I’s preamble to the Leyes nuevas (New Laws), which were
promulgated on November 20, 1542, condemns the codicia deseordenada
(unruly greed) as the root of the violent excesses waged by the king's subjects
against the Indians. Lamenting, as he had earlier in the Ordenanzas of 1526,
that the violence in the Indies weighed heavily on his conscience, the
Sovereign proposed what was in his mind a measured response to the pall of
117
vice that had befallen the Spanish empire. Weighing in on his conflicting
motivations for incursions into the Indies, Charles I displayed his reasoning
behind the new prohibitions on certain economic activities. However, by the
1540s, the conscience of the Sovereign had fully assimilated the cost-benefit
analysis of a moral economy where love and interest dovetailed.
The twenty fourth law is a case in point for its emphasis on moral
efficiency. This law requires the immediate cessation in pearl fishing “si les
paresçiere que no se puede escussar a los dichos yndios y negros el peligro de
la muerte [...]” ‘if it is believed that the aforementioned Indians and Blacks
cannot be excused from the risk of death’ (emphasis mine, Morales Padrón
435). Charles I evaluates the almost certain death of subjects, on the one hand,
and the loss of profit on the other, “porque estimamos en mucho más, como es
rrazón, la conseruaçión de sus vidas, que el ynterese que nos puede venir de las
perlas” ‘because we place greater value, as is reasonable, on the conservation of
their lives than on the interest that we could gain from the pearls.’ In addition
to the cessation of pearling operations, the reforms attempted to ameliorate
living conditions for the Sovereign's indigenous subjects, eliminate corruption
in the governing bodies of the Indies overseas (Audiencias), and streamline
judicial review of criminal and civil cases by the Consejo de Indias in Seville
(the highest governing body over the Indies with executive, legislative and
judicial powers). However, the New Laws are most famous for their
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reorganization of labor exchanges, known as the encomienda, and slavery in
the Indies.
The encomienda, whereby the indigenous gave labor in exchange for
spiritual stewardship, had been condemned for its abuses ever since Fray
Antonio de Montesinos had inveighed on the institution in his sermon on the
fourth Sunday of Advent in 1511. Yet the New Laws did not abolish slavery,
rather they issued guidelines for remedying illegitimate cases of past,
indigenous enslavement (Laws twenty and twenty-two). Similarly, the New
Laws' reform of the encomienda system tried to reduce abuses against the
indigenous and redress inequities in remuneration among the earliest
conquistadors. Thus, Law seventeen redistributed Indians from encomiendas
with an excess number of Indians to “primeros conquistadores” who had
none, colonists who were married and, ultimately, to the Crown. This new law
directly contradicted the capitulaciones (contracts) signed between the Crown
and Conquistadors, which had authorized the labor for spiritual stewardship
exchange to the conquistadors and their descendants, i.e. encomienda in
perpetuity in some cases. Less than one year later, following the outbreak of
rebellion by the encomenderos in the Viceroyalty of Peru, the Prince (and
future monarch Philip II) would overturn the newest reform of the
encomiendas, for which Father Las Casas would famously take him to task in
the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552). The rebellions
of the encomenderos also highlighted the tensions that were involved in
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making the full transition from a series of joint ventures among private and
state actors to the Sovereign's direct stewardship of the spiritual and economic
enterprise of Empire.
As explored above, the examples from the New Laws bring to the fore
the contradictions of this moral economy in which labor and conscience had
exchange values. The union of the two antithetical poles of amor—caritas and
cupiditas—was an unhappy one. Yet by the end of the 16th century they coexisted in a parallel accounting system, seemingly without contradiction, in
the 1573 Ordenanzas. How, then, can we reckon with the conquest when
accounting for sins and souls, gold and precious gems, slaves and
encomendados was intrinsic to the metaleptic habitus of conquista?
1573 Ordenanzas
As Todorov observed, the 1573 Ordenanzas prescribe dissimulation for
initial encounters between the conquistadors and the inhabitants of terrae
incognitae. Does dissembling mean that the Crown's pursuit of ‘love,’ ‘charity’
and ‘peace’ toward its American subjects or, to be more precise, American
subjects in the process of becoming, was any less sincere? Its amor, caridad
and paz were no more a semblance than the Fuggers’ request for a papal
pronouncement on the moral validity of the triple contract. However, by the
time the 1573 Ordenanzas were promulgated, reckoning with sin and
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reckoning with material wealth was a balancing act performed on an imperial
scale.
This does not mean that moral economy of empire met no resistance. As
Negri has argued, Macchiavelli had prescribed dissimulation to the embattled,
self-made leader in response to the power of the multitude. It is but one of the
options because the “multitude's unity of action is the multiplicity of actions it
is capable of” (The Porcelain Workshop 67). The union of cupiditas and
caritas in loving empire spawned circumlocutions in legal discourse to widen
the boundaries of the nomos, to make it all encompassing.
There are hundreds of ordenanzas, often couched in the conditional,
attempting to anticipate, overcome and erase insurgency. The “decision tree”
aspect of contracts signed between Sovereign and conquistador, as we have
seen in the Pedrarias Dávila and Pizarro et al. capitulaciones, are translated
back into law, branching and multiplying in ramifications as they become law.
Why question the validity of the Crown's “burdens of conscience”? Merely
indicating that these burdens did, indeed, have a value, which generated new
burdens, reveals a simulacrum of earlier injunctions against usury: the
unnatural, self-replicating specie. Let us continue to take the empire at its
word, then, and examine how moral risks could be mitigated by a change in
name and a renewal of loving discourse.
As seen in the first chapter, venture capital is an inter-subjective activity
that depends on happenstance, much like the stakes drawn in distinct events
121
to denote the difference between friendship and enmity. Yet the 1573
Ordenanzas show little appetite for risk, in moral or material terms. For the
Crown, the pecuniary stakes in play changed with the 1573 Ordenanzas,
although the moral and material stakes could not have been higher. Although
the Crown's contributions in capital to the empresas (enterprises) in the
Americas had never been overwhelming, article twenty five declared that the
Crown would no longer participate with capital investments. It also made the
distribution of wealth in new settlements proportional to the amount of the
original investment (“conforme al caudal original que uno tuviere para
emplear a mesma proporción se le dé repartimiento de solares y tierras de
pasto y labor de indios [...]” law 47). Similarly, the Crown renewed its
provisions for receiving “carried interest” (twenty percent or one fifth) from all
mining and pearling operations (law 50). These ordenanzas reaffirmed the
practice of profit distribution that we saw in the capitulaciones drawn up with
Dávila and Pizarro; namely, land, labor and nobility titles would be
commensurate to the individual’s original investment.
Moreover, the requerimiento, or something similar, continued to be
performed, as law thirteen stipulates:
las personas que fueren a descubrimientos por mar o por tierra
tomen posesión en nuestro nombre de todas las tierras de las
prouincias y [Tachado: tierras que descubrieren] partes adonde
llegaren y saltaren en tierra aziendo la solenidad y autos
necesarios de los quales trayan fee y testimonio en pública forma
en manera que haga fee. (Morales Padrón 490).
122
The persons who are to make discoveries by land or sea should
take possession, in our name, of the lands and provinces and
[Striked through: lands to be discovered] areas where they may
arrive and land. They shall make the solemn and necessary acts
to which they will give faith and testimony in a public manner.
“Tierras que descubrieren” ‘lands to be discovered’ was the phrase that
reiterated and highlighted the contingency of “the discoveries” on the “solemn
acts” and, unsurprisingly, become the target of attempted erasure. Perhaps
this was due to the embarrassment at the self-fulfilling, performative acts of
possession; yet the circumlocution, “areas where they arrive and land,”
nonetheless describe the tautology of the acts, and bring greater attention to
the details of performances that were already learned, a habitus of conquista.
Similarly, the encomienda continues to function and forced resettlements are
reaffirmed as the norm (laws 50 and 58). Though the laws repeat concern for
the indigenous within the framework of divine providence, prescribed
reactions are contingent upon resistance and insurgency.
The indigenous are approached as “friends” but treated as enemies; the
public square is to be cordoned off in order to wage preemptive attacks against
the indigenous (law 113).34 Law 136 revisits the modality of the requerimento
and its enumeration of benefits as part of the peaceful submission package.
The law is expressed in the conditional construction:
Si los naturales se quisieren poner en defender la poblaçión se les dé
a entender como se quiere poblar allí no para hazerles algún mal ni
34
The construction of a palisade in the public square recalls Negri’s definition of that
“place where the individual can distribute gifts to friends and inflict death on
enemies”(17).
123
tomarles sus haziendas sino por tomar amystad con ellos y
enseñarlos a bivir políticamente y mostrarles a conocer a dios y
enseñarles su ley por la qual se salbarán dándoseles a entender por
medio de los religiossos y clérigos y personas que para ellos diputare
el gouernador y por buenas lenguas y procurando por todos los
buenos medios posibles que la poblaçión se haga con su paz y
consentimiento y si todavía no lo consintieren hauiéndoles
requerido por los dichos medios diuersas vezes los pobladores
hagan su poblaçión sin tomar de lo que fuere particular de los indios
y sin hazerles mas daño del que fuere menester para defensa de los
pobladores y para que la poblaçión no se estorue. (515)
If the natives were to mount a defense against the [new] settlement
make them understand that we wish to settle there. [We do not
intend] to harm them or take their property but to befriend them
and teach them how to live politically and show them to know God
and his law through which they will be saved by the religious and
clergy and persons and good interpreters to whom the governor has
delegated this mission. By all good means possible [procure] that
the settlement be made with their peaceful consent. And if they still
do not consent, even if they still have not consented by different
means on various occasions, the settlers should settle without
taking what belongs to the Indians and without doing more harm
that what is necessary for the defense of the settlers, so that the
settlement is not impeded. (Emphases mine)
Unlike the earliest version of the requerimiento, this legal document does not
detail the painful consequences entailed in any refusal to submit; rather, it
emphasizes what the natives stand to gain by consent. The litany of empire’s
benefits expands the love interest of conquista via an economy of scale, in the
metalepsis of contiguity and similitude. By virtue of rhetorical largesse it seeks
to erase the violence of conquista and its ignominy but to retain the habitus of
love interest.
124
The circumlocution of violence, and its attempted erasure, only serves
to delineate it, much like a palisade constructed around a public square. The
conquistadors, no longer, cannot take the property of the indigenous,
according to the letter of the law. How can they stand to make a profit?
Necessity and defense mitigate against the main benefits of the societas and its
practitioners: shared risk and ownership. As proposed in the first chapter, the
great promise of venture capital is not collateral offered as security, or the
interest garnered upon repayment of a loan. Carried interest is so profitable as
a function of appropriation for posterity. So, the law orders a paradox:
appropriation in a property vacuum.
The law thus depends on two fictions: the settlement of inhabited lands
without misappropriation and the absence of aggression. In this imagined “no
man's land,” there are no aggressors; both the Indians and the settlers are
“defenders.” Even so, measures of harm may be doled out to would-be-friends.
Once the land is pacified “estando la tierra pacífica,” the Indians are to be
distributed in encomiendas or repartimientos (redistributions, another
redundancy) and are obligated to pay “moderate tribute” in kind (usufruct,
that is, “frutos de la tierra” ‘fruits of the earth’). Peaceful evangelization and
pacification include taking hostages under the premise of offering an
education in ‘proper attire’ (law 142). Yet the law concedes its ignorance on all
the manners to proceed ‘conveniently’ and leaves ‘other means necessary’
125
(“otros medios que paresçieren conuinientes") to the discretion of the
pacifiers, explorers, discoverers but not conquerors:
Si para que mejor se paçifiquen los naturales fueren[sic] menester
conçederles ynmunidad de que no paguen tributos por algún tiempo
se les conçeda y otros preuillegios y exençiones y lo que se les
prometiere se les cumpla. (Law 146)
If it is better to concede a temporal immunity from paying tribute in
order to procure the pacification of the natives, do this and grant
other privileges and exemptions and ensure that everything
promised is fulfilled.
Contingency plans in the law thus prescribe exemptions to the law and include
intelligence-gathering measures that will lead to further ramifications in the
decision tree. The circumlocutions of the law must concede that that the law
has boundaries. Paradoxically, the excess in codifying the love interests of
empire only served to highlight the law’s limitations.
Can “loving empire” make claims to providential discovery, while
engaged in a never-ending pursuit of contingencies? As we shall see in the next
chapter, the apologists of Spain's empire insisted on providence as the telos in
discovery, conquest, exploration. Yet the imperial apparatus codified its
activities in the Indies in response to the happenstance of friendship and
enmity.35 Who are the Christians in this world where stakes are driven into the
ground to make a palisade of the public square? How could they be
35
“For to love friendship,” as Derrida contends while addressing Nietzche, “it is not
enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future. And
there is no more just category for the future than that of the ‘perhaps’ ” (The Politics
of Friendship 29).
126
recognized? Could Christ’s injunction to love your enemies as a friend be
obeyed without charging interest?
127
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Chapter Three
The Specters of Las Casas in the Political Theology of José de Acosta
Dijeron que el papa debía estar borracho
cuando lo hizo, pues daba lo que no era
suyo, y que el Rey, que pedía y tomaba la
merced, debía ser algún loco, pues pedía lo
que era de otros, y que fuese allá a tomarla,
que ellos le pondrían la cabeza en un palo,
como tenían otras, de otros enemigos suyos
[…] y dijeron que eran señores de su tierra
y que no había menester otro señor.
Martín Fernández de Enciso, Suma de
geografía (1519)
The exchanges proposed by venture capital in the conquest depend
on an understanding of love that privileges the metaleptic use of amor and
interés as synonyms, seemingly without contradiction. Reception of this
ideology defined the political and religious thought of Bartolomé de las
Casas (1484-1566) and José de Acosta (1539-1600), whose influence was
felt beyond the Spanish speaking world both among their contemporaries
and by subsequent generations. 1
See Conley and also Rabasa in Writing Violence for the reception and translation of
the Brevísima in Protestant Europe. The Brevísima was the only work by Las Casas
that was translated and printed in modern European languages during the 16th
century. Manuscripts of his Historia de las Indias, De unico vocationis modo,
Apologética historia, De regia potestate, De thesauris, etc. were circulated and read
among members of his activist network in Iberia and the Indies. See Parish for
detailed accounts of the circulation, reception and publication of the early works by
Las Casas (The Only Way and The Life and Writings). See Losada and Denglos for
circulation and reception of De thesauris and the Tratado de las doce dudas (in Obras
completas). Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), in contrast, was an
instant “bestseller” in Spain, Italy, France and England both in translations to modern
languages and in Latin. See also Del Valle “José de Acosta, violence and rhetoric,” for
her discussion of the influence of the Spiritual Exercises by the founder of the Society
of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), on Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las
Indias. To place Acosta’s oevre within the longue durée of Spanish scientific writings
1
129
Recently, these two authors have both been acclaimed as precursors
to “liberation theology” and “teología india,” movements that privilege the
poor, on the one hand, and indigenous cultures’ existential understanding
of themselves on the other.2 This chapter examines the related concepts of
freedom and salvation as professed by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las
Casas and its reception and criticism by the Jesuit José de Acosta. Although
both authors shared the conviction that the Spanish invasion of the
Americas had been illegal, their views on free trade and evangelization
methods could not be further apart. As these moral and legal exceptions
are related directly to the state of exception, as seen in chapters one and
two, their treatment of these two exceptions (to usury and jus gentium)
merit the in depth inquiry of this chapter. It is not enough to define one’s
position within the circular logic of the law. The prescriptions for
converting the indigenous to Catholiciscm made by Las Casas and Acosta
were inextricably tied to their understanding of the indigenous subject’s
self-knowledge and knowledge of the world.
and imperialism, see Cañizares-Esguerra’s Nature, Empire and Nation. A little over a
hundred years after the first publication of the Historia natural, Giambattista Vico
(1668-1744) referenced José de Acosta and Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) in his
exposition of the poetic history of primitive peoples in the New Science (1701).
2 For comparisons to liberation theology, see Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus
Christ by Gustavo Gutiérrez and Walter Mignolo’s Introduction to the English
translation of Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias. For the lascasian
origins of “teología india” see Rabasa, Tell me the Story of How I Conquered You; in
defense of his use of the term “teología india” against the inquiries of the Office of the
Doctrine of the Faith, López Hernández has reminded Church authorities that it was
Bartolomé de las Casas who originally coined the term, theologia indorum or
“theology of the Indians.”
130
Were conquista, and its discontents, “haunting” the Spanish held
Indies? Acosta belonged to the writers of the post-1573 generation for
whom conquista, following the prohibitions of the law seen in the first and
second chapters, ought to have been a memory of the past. 3 It would be
impossible to imagine Acosta writing De procuranda indorum salute (1589)
and his Historia natural y moral de las indias (1590) without the written
work and activism of Las Casas in the back of his mind. Yet not once does
Acosta mention Las Casas by name in De procuranda, even though he
polemicizes with the entire body of lascasian thought, especially from the
latter years, throughout his work. Though Las Casas belonged to an earlier
generation of missionaries in the Americas and had passed away four years
before the young Acosta would receive his order to travel to Peru in 1570,
the Dominican friar cast a long shadow over the Jesuit’s mission and
livelihood. When Acosta arrived in Peru he found that the new viceroy
Francisco de Toledo (1515-82) had recently upended the Crown’s strategy
toward the Vilcabamba insurgency by choosing military invasion over
diplomacy; the last Inca of Vilcambamba, Tupac Amaru I, had been
executed in the public square in Cuzco only months before Acosta set foot in
Callao in April 1572. On the ideological front, Toledo scoured the Inca
centers of power for native informants whose histories could attest to an
Inca tyranny. His efforts attempted to counteract the proponents of selfIn the spirit of Michel de Certeau’s paradoxical assertion that “the ghosts find access
through writing on the condition that they remain forever silent” (Writing of History
2).
3
131
rule based on native elite structures, such as the Incas or the curacas,
without the secular apparatus of the colonial state.
The advocacy of Dominican friars, such as Domingo de Santo Tomás
(1499-1570), on behalf of the curacas of the Mantaro Valley in the 1560s
had received theoretical support from Las Casas in De thesauris (1563),
which sought remedies and remuneration on behalf of the indigenous for
the lives and treasure lost with the Spanish invasions.4 The Tratado de las
doce dudas (1564) asserted, without a doubt, that the damage done to the
Indies was irredeemable and that Spain’s monarchs and its people would be
forever damned unless they retreated from the Americas. Supporters of Las
Casas were dispersed among faculties of theology and indigenous languages
in Lima and among Dominican, Jesuit and Augustinian friars in the
highlands. The advocacy for self determination by this lascasian network
was opposed by the extirpadores de idolatrías, such as Martín de Murúa
(1525-1628) and Cristóbal de Albornoz (1530-?).
José de Acosta established close ties to the Viceroy and ecclesiastical
hierarchy in Alto and Bajo Perú. Soon after his arrival in Lima, Acosta
traveled throughout Cuzco, Juli, Arequipa, La Paz, Chuquisaca (Sucre) and
Potosí in an itinerary and time table that largely coincided with Viceroy
Toledo’s informaciones and ordenanzas. Upon his return to the Ciudad de
The posthumous publication of De regia potestate (1571) in Frankfurt, which
argued in favor of autonomous, native rule, has led researchers to question its
authorship. In their introductory study, Pereña and González Rodríguez point to
evidence in favor of Las Casas’ authorship.
4
132
los Reyes (Lima), Acosta participated as a calificador in the Inquisition trial
against three Dominicans, Francisco de la Cruz (d. 1578), Pedro del Toro,
and Alonso Gasco, and a woman, María Pizarro.5 De la Cruz was burnt at
the stake for heresy; his citations for apostasy against the faith included
advocacy for polygyny among laymen, the abolition of celibacy for priests,
and promoting the priesthood of women and the self determination of the
indigenous peoples of Peru. De la Cruz had occupied a high post in the
eccelesiastical hierarchy of colonial Peru; his beliefs, his apostasy and his
downfall must have had quite an effect on Acosta, who would later warn
fellow and future missionaries in De procuranda indorum salute of the
corrupting influence of native practices on the spiritual and physical health
of priests.
Acosta saw the influence of the devil in native practices which,
uncannily, mirrored Christian sacraments (such as anthropophagy :
Eucharist), and were referred to broadly as examples of simia dei. His
influence on the decisions and catechisms developed during the III Council
of Lima (1582-3) are widely documented (Lisi).6 The catechisms
emphasized exploration of the native interlocutor’s conscience for details of
For the larger context of the Lima Inquisition within the empire as a whole, see The
Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies by Charles Lea. The proceedings against
Francisco de la Cruz can be read in the editions by Abel Castelló et al. See Marcel
Bataillon’s “La herejía de fray Francisco de la Cruz y la reacción antilascasiana” for a
persuasive argument that the proceedings against Francisco de la Cruz had wider
repercussions against Las Casas and his followers in Perú.
6 Acosta personally brought the minutes of the proceedings and decisions of the III
Concilio limense to Rome, for the Pontiff’s approval, in 1588 and Philip II’s ratification
in the Escorial in 1591.
5
133
illicit sexual acts (especially sodomy, fellatio, incest, polygyny) and
knowledge of accounting and narrative practices (the khipu) for extirpation
campaigns.7 By promoting the sacking of tombs and areas of ancestor
worship in order to confiscate the narrative khipus, Acosta pushed back
against Las Casas’ arguments that all objects associated with native burial
practices belonged to the indigenous and their descendants. Soon after his
participation in the III Concilio and a brief sojourn in Mexico, Acosta
returned to Spain where he continued to scale the hierarchy within his
order and in academic circles; he died in 1600 as the Superior of the Jesuits
in Valladolid and the rector of the Colegio jesuíta in Salamanca.
More than any other humanist and religious thinker who preceded
him, including Francisco de Vitoria (1492-1546), Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
(1490-1573) and Domingo de Soto (1494-1560), Father José de Acosta
asserted within the parameters of his faith and reason that spiritual
enterprise was a comparable and inseparable handmaiden to free trade. His
position on the role of trade in evangelization could not have been more
alienating to the project of Bartolomé de las Casas. Throughout his
ecclesiastical career, first as an ordained priest and later as a Dominican
friar, Protector of the Indians and Bishop of Chiapas, Las Casas had firmly
As demonstrated by Horswell, the Spanish tradition of material and discursive
persecution of “efeminados” and “sodomitas” was employed in Perú to justify the
conquest, once colonists had experienced and observed third gender rituals.
Harswell’s Decolonizing the Sodomite offers a history of indigenous gender and
sexuality in Perú by taking Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency
as his methodological starting point.
7
134
believed in the positive influence of Iberian peasantry and tradesmen in
securing the trust of indigenous interlocutors; he had little faith in capital
and its agents.8 His failed settlement in Cumaná (Venezuela) and his
ventures into evangelization in Verapaz were exemplary of peaceful contact,
for his supporters and detractors alike. Las Casas thus established an
important precedent in the discourse of evangelization: firstly, any
discussion of method had to take into account the indigenous habitus prior
to contact; secondly, indigenous reception of the Faith could not be
divorced from an honest and detailed accounting of the violent methods
used by missionaries and conquistadores and the injuries sustained by the
indigenous in these encounters. Thus, his treatise on the only way to
evangelize the indigenous, known by its shortened Latin title, De unico
modo, envisioned, and put into practice, merchants and missionaries
entering indigenous lands, unarmed and willing to assume martyrdom.
The Historia de las indias and its offshoot, the Apologética historia,
complemented De unico modo’s treatise on evangelization by contesting the
Aristotelian argument in favor of natural slavery on several rhetorical
fronts. As Hanke has observed, Las Casas had a mercurial relationship with
the Philosopher (124-5). If in 1519, Las Casas denounced Aristotle as a
heathen philosopher whose beliefs on proper government had no bearing
Las Casas shows his appreciation for cultivated fields and derision for the Spanish
rush for gold in the Brevísima. It is not that Las Casas disparaged all means of
usufruct, rather he valued sweat and toil that did not get subsumed into the processes
of capital. Unlike Acosta, Las Casas did not count the activities of the conquistadores
as labor.
8
135
on Christendom, the Apologética would argue that indigenous societies
displayed the characteristics of civilized societies, by referencing the
categories employed by Aristotle in his Politics.9 To Juan Ginés de
Sepúlveda, the learned humanist and translator of the Politics, Las Casas
showed little deference, arguing that Sepúlveda had not understood
Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery which was, in any case, irrelevant to
the Indies since only a reduced number of individuals in any one society,
but not entire peoples, could be considered natural slaves. Moreover, the
indigenous could not be enslaved under the civil regime envisioned by
Aristotle as the Spanish had no just cause for war against the indigenous,
who had every right to defend themselves against violent invaders. At the
same time, as Rabasa has contended in Inventing America (164-79), Las
Casas later undermined the conventional alignment of binary oppositions
(civilized vs. Barbaric, Christian vs. Heathen, sheep vs. wolves) in the
Brevíssima and Apologética, thus questioning the relevance of binary
thought and the Aristotelian paradigm in and of themselves.
Do all these references to Aristotle make Las Casas an Aristotleian
thinker, as O’Gorman has argued? His ongoing and evolving dialogue with
Artistotelian thought throughout his life suggests that Las Casas felt
compelled to engage with Aristotle, but was not an Aristotelian per se.
Confronted with justifications of natural slavery and civil slavery at every
In De unico modo, Las Casas defines love based on the Aristotelian definitions (in the
Ethics, Metaphysics and Politics).
9
136
turn in the practice of conquest in the Indies, Las Casas whittled away at
them both for over fifty years, using all the rhetorical tools at his disposal.
This included arguing within the Aristotelian system and without it,
depending on the project at hand.
Las Casas learned from his enemies. He would argue, forcefully, that
the indigenous learned many things, including rationalization of the
irrational, from their enemy invaders. From Fernández de Enciso’s Suma
de geografía (1519), Las Casas discovered the power of the Indians’ voices,
as an original source that resisted the framework of imperial apologetics
within which it was presented.10 In his narrative of the requerimiento’s
reception in Cenú, Fernández de Enciso cites indigenous arguments against
the requerimiento as examples of their unruliness, their lack of respect for
King and Pontiff, and a resistance inspired by spite:
Respondiéronme que en lo que decía que no había sino un
Dios y que éste gobernaba en el cielo y la tierra y que era señor
de todo, que les parecía bien y que así debía de ser, pero que
en lo que decía que el papa era señor de todo el Universo, en
lugar de Dios, y que él había hecho merced de aquella tierra al
rey de Castilla, dijeron que el papa debía estar borracho
cuando lo hizo, pues daba lo que no era suyo, y que el Rey, que
pedía y tomaba la merced, debía ser algún loco, pues pedía lo
que era de otros, y que fuese allá a tomarla, que ellos le
pondrían la cabeza en un palo, como tenían otras, de otros
enemigos suyos […] y dijeron que eran señores de su tierra y
que no había menester otro señor.
(qted in Las Casas Historia de las Indias III.63)
Las Casas refers to him derisively as the “Bachiller Anciso” who believed in the legal
fictions of the requerimiento because he was an argumentative lawyer; “y como Anciso
era jurista, debió parecerle que justificaba, con usar del requerimiento, mejor sus
robos y violencias que iba a hacer a los vecinos de Cenú.”
10
137
They answered me that, as for my saying that there was but
one God, and that this God ruled heaven and earth and was
Lord of all, this seemed all well and good, and this is how
things must be. But when it came to the Pope being lord of the
universe, in the place of God, and that he had granted the favor
of bestowing that land on the King of Castile, they said that the
Pope must have been drunk when he did that, since he was
“bestowing” something that was not his, and that the King who
requested and accepted the favor must have been somewhat
mad, since he was requesting something belonging to someone
else, and that he should come here and [try to] take it himself
so they could drive his head on a stake as they had with other
enemies […] And they said that they were lords of their land
and that there was no need of another lord.
Limiting his commentary to a reiteration of the arguments and questions
raised by the men of Cenú, Las Casas concludes, sardonically, that this
Bachiller, believer in legal fictions, must have created what could only be a
fictitious response. For, in the space of an hour, and with no knowledge of
each others’ languages, how could they have discussed pontiffs, donations,
monarchs and the Trinity? And yet, as with the eloquence of Hatüey or the
mothers justifying infanticide both in the Brevíssima and the Historia de
las Indias, Las Casas does not deny the truth of the people of Cenú’s claims.
Fernández de Enciso had also accused the indigenous of committing suicide
out of spite, in order to deny Spanish access to labor, and rejecting forced
baptism. Las Casas does not deny the possibility of spite driving the
indigenous responses to the requerimiento, rather he factors in the original
action of the conquistadors and evangelizers in his economy of retribution
(i.e., indigenous despecho for the conquistador’s amor).
138
Las Casas does not deny these motivations, rather he argues that
rational, caring human beings would not have reacted in any other way. It
has been widely noted that suicide in the public square is the greatest
example, and the most feared act of defiance, of the empire’s limits on
regulating biopower. 11 All the more so in the labor and spiritual exchanges
of the encomienda system that placed a premium on the labor and souls of
potential neophytes. Suicide introduced a radical alterity into that equation
and, despite Fernández de Enciso’s protestations to the contrary,
articulated a rational rejection of Christianity as it was practiced in the
Americas by its zealous proponents.
With De unico vocationis modo omnium gentium ad veram
religionem, Las Casas aimed to widen the breach between the general
partners of the conquista, Church and State, and to reintroduce missionary
work as a labor fraught with moral and physical peril; his ideal missionary
would not count on armed men to guard his life, thus armed men would
have no place in the social order. He proposed entering Tuzutlán, in
In his lectures on “Security, Territory, Population,” Foucault tied “massifying” forms
of biopower to the emergence of the absolutist, European state. The role of trading
companies in exploiting biopower, in the economy of life and death in the Indies,
would not fit in a Foucauldian history of biopower. According to Hardt and Negri,
"Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it,
interpreting it, absorbing it—every individual embraces and reactivates this power of
his or her own accord. Its primary task is to administer life. Biopower thus refers to a
situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and
reproduction of life itself” (Empire 24). Their example for the limits of Empire recalls
the self-immolation of Buddhist monks in Tibet.
11
139
Guatemala, a place known as tierra de guerra by the Spanish colonizers,
without any means of physical defense.
As argued in the second chapter, inhabitants of designated tierras de
guerra were living a social death, already accounted for as slaves-to-becaptured. For the Dominican missionaries there were no guarantees of
success and no temporal horizons to account for timely conversion. At the
same time, the haste of the conquistadors and their leaders to gain
dominion over native lands and labor had created malicious delay in the
true conversion of the indigenous. For Las Casas, this damage to others was
irreparable; robbed of their time to repent, the indigenous saw their
opportunities for salvation cut off:
sed potissime tempus vitae, quo necesario indigent ad fidem
suscipiendam, baptismum et paenitentiam tollantur […] Ergo
maximum peccatum inter peccata contra proximum committit,
qui causam dat illius perditionis. (De unico modo 526)
especially for having robbed them of their lifetime which
would have been enough to receive the faith, baptism and
repentance […] Thus they commit the gravest of all sins
against another, for they have been the cause of the other’s
perdition.
Rooted in the Scholastic understanding of time as a thing of God, the theft
of time—unlike material and spiritual goods—had no remedy or
satisfaction; perhaps the only satisfaction would be the knowledge that the
thieves had committed a mortal sin that could not be absolved, likely,
because no act of reparation would adequately compensate the aggrieved
for the time lost that could have been spent in a state of grace: “sunt ergo
140
rei supradicti omnes totius damnationis omnium eorum” ‘so that all the
aforementioned men are accused of damnation.’ Only sins against the Holy
Spirit are unforgivable, but by raising the specter of the impossibility of
accounting for the lost time in a state of grace of another, Las Casas
approaches an aporia in the Catholic economy of faith and repentance. We
can infer from Las Casas’ economy of time and repentance that absolution
for encomenderos, and, ultimately, the Sovereign, was impossible. It was an
impossible possibility that went against the doctrine of the Church, as all
sins except for that against the Holy Spirit are forgiveable, but it
nonetheless existed by fiat, de facto, much like the empire of Spain was said
to exist in the Indies, because a handful of men, the preachers who refused
to give the encomenderos absolution, had willed it so.
Moreover, Las Casas notified, that is, required, the encomenderos of
Verapaz and beyond to remain without the process of dialogue with entire
peoples. As the full title of his treatise suggests, Las Casas struggled with
the “protected” status of individual Christian neophytes within larger
communities of nonbelievers. Where Las Casas did turn to free trade, he did
so in an effort to place trade in the service of evangelization. Thus, when he
attempted to put his ideas into practice in Verapaz, Las Casas enlisted
indigenous Christian merchants, who already traded with the indios de
guerra, to continue trading while singing of their faith in Maya. If their
professions of faith were met with welcome and the community reached a
consensus to invite missionaries, only then would Spanish missionaries
141
follow traders into this tierra de guerra. The emphasis on omnium gentium
both underscored the universal ambitions of his project and its inherent
paradoxes: how to maintain the cohesion of the gentium, while undergoing
the fracturing and denial of self that is part of the conversion process.
Bartolomé de las Casas’s approach to defending indigenous claims to
sovereignty thus became a case by case defense and an itemized call for
remedies and satisfaction. Both the Brevísima and the Historia de las indias
offer an overwhelming casuistry that defends the real political subject in each
and every case of attempted subjugation.12 Las Casas addressed the coherence
of the indigenous peoples of America, and especially of Perú, within the
capital flows of empire in De thesauris. The Tratado de las doce dudas
served as a supplement in moral and political theology to De thesauris.
Described by researchers, such as Ángel Losada, as a largely
incongruent treatise written in the last years of his life, De thesauris (1564)
couples Las Casas arguments favoring reparation for looted tombs and
sacred places and beings (huacas) in Peru, and also Mexico, with the
illegitimacy of the conquest of the Indies. Like the Doce dudas (1564), De
As Giorgio Agamben has shown in his analysis of Paul´s letters, messianic time is
defined by the suspension of the law, of the exception as law, when paradox reigns and
our understanding of “the people” becomes fragmentary. For Agamben, the political
legacy of Pauline messianism (the when and how of conversion to Christianity) is the
remnant, “that which can never coincide with itself, as all or as part, that which
infinitely remains or resists in each division, and, with all due respect to those who
govern us, never allows us to be reduced to a majority or a minority. The remnant is
the figure, or the substantiality assumed by a people in a decisive moment, and as such
is the only real political subject” (57). This real political subject, whom the
requerimiento created, while denying its right to exist, also offers another frontier, in
consciousness, to which imperial power would stake a claim.
12
142
thesauris reflects on the judgments that confessors had to make when
hearing the confessions of conquistadores and encomenderos. What if they
confessed to pillaging a tomb? Or owing back wages to their servants? What
if they had waged war a sangre y a fuego? Or if they had burdened their
Indians with too much tribute? Or worked them to death in the mines?
What could be asked of them to make reparations and give satisfaction to
the aggrieved? Who was ultimately responsable?
De thesauris defines the state of the question by opening with the
specific, material case of the huacas, their belongings and their ownership:
Nunc autem queritur en illa pertinebunt indifferenter ad
quemlibet qui, uel propia autoritate, uel de licentia Regum
nostrorum Hispaniarum siue gubernatorum, nomine regio,
partes illas gubernantium, quesierit, foderit, repererit et
tulerit, animo sibi retinendi, itaque acquirat dominium earum
rerum pretiosarum siue thesaurorum et possit, salva
conscientia, retinere. (12)
The question is whether all this [treasure] shall belong,
indiscriminately, to whomever that, or by his authority, or
with license by our Spanish monarchs, or by the governers who
in their name head the governments of these regions, search
(quesierit), unearth, find and remove it for the purpose of
keeping it, if they shall aquire domininion over these precious
treasures and can, in good conscience, keep them.
Las Casas presented this state of the question and his response as part of
his last will and testament to Philip II. His reference to regum nostrorum
Hispaniorum specifies his own sense of belonging while (re)presenting the
habitus of others’ belongings. In the document that keeps his own,
impending interment on the horizon, Las Casas offers a juxtaposition in
authocthony: recall the place where “our” and “their” ancestors are buried.
143
This exercise in juxtaposed authocthony—the sense of belonging that comes
from the deep earth (cthon) both as grave and source of abundance—goes to
the heart of the contradiction in searching out inhabited terrae incognitae.
How can this treasure, which can be found only through the
knowledge of native inhabitants, be the object of conquista? His use of the
verb quaerere could not be more explicit. Las Casas thus begins his own
inquest into authocthonous wealth by recalling similar practices of burial
among all peoples of antiquity. The original intent and honors of such
burials could only be undone, willingly, by the owners of the grave or their
descendants. Foreign kings could not even inquire, that is, discover, conquaerare, their locations and belongings. Since the moment of the first
discovery, by Columbus, most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas
had not proferred the wealth of their ancestors to the conquistadors of their
own free will, thus the Crown and the conquistadores remained indebted to
them and their descendants. Moreover, Las Casas suggests that the entire
conquest was suspect as the wealth of burials had served to fund
subsequent expeditions (i.e., its scalability in the modus operandi of
venture capital). Furthermore, the Papal Donation had given the Spanish
monarchs the responsibility to evangelize in the Indies, but not to have
dominion over it. Responsibility, for Las Casas, included providing the
material means for missionary work. Yet most capitulaciones signed from
the 1560s onward did not provide the salaries for priests associated with the
ventures; the indigenous were expected to tithe in addition to providing
144
tribute, in labor and in kind, to the encomenderos or corregidores. This
situation was untenable, especially when imperial expansion had depended
on priests for labor and capital. A notorious example was Hernando de
Luque, who had participated as a socio in the conquista of Peru with
Francisco Pizzaro, Diego Almagro, and the Licenciado Espinoza, and had
profited from the huacas.
The mendicant orders led by Archbishop Loaysa in Lima heralded the
decade of the 1560s with Avisos breves para todos los confesores del Perú
cerca de las cosas que en él suele haver de más peligro y dificultad in
March 1560. Based on Las Casas’ earlier confesionario, the twenty six
articles of the Avisos breves (1560) created a manual for confessors that
provided the counterpart to the decision-tree like manuals of the
capitulaciones for venture capitalists, analyzed in the second chapter. The
avisos took the confesionario once step further because they tried to
account for all parties involved in the business of conquest: weapons
dealers, merchants, and servants; pretty much anyone who had received
something in specie or in kind from a conquistador was in danger of not
receiving absolution. Those in doubt had to provide restitution to the
Indians. Doubt, rather than polemic, informed the experience of conquest
and understanding of self for all parties involved. The Tratado de las doce
dudas most likely arose as Las Casas’ response to twelve doubts put forward
by a fellow Dominican friar, Fray Bartolomé Vega, when he was consulted
as a moral authority (Denglos xvi-xxxv).
145
As opposed to a debate on the state of a question, that can be
discussed on the merits, a doubt, for a Catholic subject, as a practical
matter, is a mortal sin. Yet acting with a doubtful conscience without
justifying the act beforehand could prove even more problematic when the
subject in question is a Catholic sovereign. Ultimately, the Doce Dudas
touched upon the doubt of a decider, the Sovereign, on the lawfulness or
unlawfulness of an action, or the law itself; doubt, which is a matter of
moral theology, was treated by Las Casas as political theology avant la
lettre; Las Casas would not free the deciders of the exception, Schmitt’s
definition of the Sovereign three centuries later, from their doubts on the
exception.
In De thesauris, Las Casas had implied that the Sovereign could not
be absolved of mortal sin unless he or she decided in favor of the liberty of
the indigenous, whose violation implied a series of remedies and
satisfactions. In the Doce dudas, the doubts of the Sovereign that had been
made manifest in the preambles to the laws on the Indies promulgated in
1526 and 1542, required an urgent resolution. The economy of conscience,
the weight and measure of it, so famously articulated by Charles I in the
1526 Ordenanzas and later the Leyes nuevas (1542), were for Las Casas a
manifestation of a Sovereign conscience in a state of sin.
From Las Casas’ treatment of Sovereign doubts, it can be inferred
that promulgating laws in a state of ambivalence were sinful acts. Enacting
laws that codified ambivalence between caritas and cupiditas was doubly
146
pernicious. As his last will and testament, Las Casas willed his Sovereign to
recognize that caritas and cupiditas were antithetical. It was as if Las
Casas, ever ironic, were asking of his Sovereign, you must decide.
The thorny question of the Sovereign’s liability directly touches upon
the recourse to exceptions in the venture capital model and its role in the
denouement of the state of exception in the conquest of America. The
sources for the first shipments of bullion from Perú were well known:
ceremonial centers had been sacked as payment for the ransoms of
indigenous leaders such as, most famously, Atahualpa, but also the curacas
of Lima, Pachacamac, Jauja and Huancavelica. The objects made of gold
and silver, feathers, paint, stones and ceramic were stripped down to their
metal base and melted into bullion in Cajamarca before they were
distributed, packed and shipped to Panamá and Seville. Investors and
partners, such as the licenciado Espinoza, in Nicaragua and Panamá had to
be repaid; the King had to receive his carried interest (quinta real). By
dedicating an entire treatise to the lost treasures of Perú and the
illegitimacy of the conquest as a whole, Las Casas exploited the extensive
documentation of grave looting in Perú to expose the insurmountable debt
of the empire, from its very inception as a series of venture capital funds, to
the peoples of the Indies.
Incurring mortal sins for crimes against jus gentium, which Las
Casas argued were crimes against God’s covenant with Christians, and
amassing debt with the indigenous dead and their descendants places the
147
very conscience of the sovereign at hock; how can it be repaid, let alone
absolved? It was a gesture that drowned the trope firing the imperial
foundry; Las Casas refused to privilege the translation of the indigenous
sacer into the metropoli’s capital; it upheld the alterity of the huaca in the
castellanos de oro passing hands in the European money markets. To the
credit of Las Casas, he raised the specter of the indigenous ancestors over
the credit of the Spanish sovereign.
As noted by the Portuguese ambassador who was received by Philip
II in his audiencia, the crédito of the Spanish sovereign was formidable: a
chest full of bullion on display in the throne room (Sanz Ayán 21). Yet this
ostentatious wealth belied a constant lack of liquidity. 1557 was the first
year in which the Spanish Crown had to default on its debt service to its
creditors and it marked a shift in the Crown’s modus operandi for financing
the state and its wars on the European continent. The experience with
bankruptcy had led Philip II, the Consejo de Castilla and officials of the
Casa de Contrataciones to ask the encomenderos of Perú and the new
viceroy, the Conde de Nieva, to make him an offer for concession of the
encomiendas in perpetuity. Domingo de Santo Tomás and Fray Bartolomé
de las Casas, on behalf of the curacas of Perú responded, famously, by
making Philip II a counter-offer.
Whereas the Crown’s quinta from its American ventures had figured
prominently as a source of credit prior to the 1557 default, the full haul of
the treasure galleons increasingly underwrote loans for the Crown after
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that first crisis of faith in Philip II’s credit. The ramifications of De
thesauris for the empire and its financiers after 1557 were all too clear;
servicing one kind of obligation while ignoring another made the good faith
of these negocios entirely dependant on the worst kind of theft: of the time
for salvation and the wealth of the dead and their descendants. Almost
immediately following the passage of the 1573 ordenanzas, and almost ten
years after the passing of fray Bartolomé de las Casas, the Crown would
once again find itself unable to fulfill its obligations, material or otherwise.
Acosta condoned grave robbery in the name of saving the Indies from
the scourge of the devil in his subterranean domains. As argued in De unico
modo by Las Casas, the devil and idolatry entered the Indies with the
cupiditas of the conquistadors. Acosta’s project to free the indigenous was
surely no less earnest than that of Las Casas; yet for the Jesuit, the greed
that fueled the conquista was a godsend as it brought Christianity to
dominions ruled by the devil.13 The extirpation of huacas and their
accompanying narrative objects, the khipus, had to be compensated in some
way. It was, after all, hard work, that needed compensation. It is thus
hardly surprising that Acosta would model his Historia natural y moral de
las indias and the De procuranda indorum salute apud Barbaros on the
influential works of Las Casas. However, the similarities between their
works were limited to the format: Latin treatise on evangelization
For the argument that English colonists were similarly motivated, see Jorge
Cañizares-Esguerra’s Puritan Conquistadors.
13
149
accompanied by a History of the Indies that examined the indigenous
habitus before and after the conquest. Though their projects shared a
similar approach, the culmination of comparative ethnology within
Aristotelian categories in Spanish letters, according to Pagden in The Fall of
Natural Man, their ethos could not be further apart. 14
Acosta and Las Casas held similar positions on the Papal Donation as
argued by the School of Salamanca, especially the articulation of legal titles
of appropriation by Francisco de Vitoria. Vitoria’s equanimous treatment of
the seven “unsuitable and illegitimate titles” (tituli non idonei sec legitimi)
have been celebrated by generations of jurists in the realm of international law
(Schmitt Nomos of the Earth 113-20). Vitoria contested rights of appropriation
based on imperial world domination, papal world domination, the right of
discovery, the rejection of Christianity, the crimes of barbarians, the free
consent of Indians, and divine (providential) donation. However, Vitoria´s
seven “suitable and legitimate titles” of appropriation (tituli idonei ac legitimi)
provide an opening for inquiry into the assumptions of hegemonic, universalist
thought: right to free trade (jus comercii), right to propagate the faith (jus
propagandae fidei), the right to protection (for Christian Indians), papal
14 Allow me to state the obvious: there are no institutes or organizations that
cherish the memory of José de Acosta as an advocate for the indigenous and the
underserved in Latin American societies. This, despite the fact that Acosta’s major
works have benefited from more continous publication since the sixteenth
century. A comparison of the two thinkers along the lines of their reception of
Aristotelian thought thus seems somewhat arbitrary, unless it accounts for their
respective positions on the time and place of conversion of the indigenous and the
place of free trade in evangelization.
150
mandate (jus mandati), intervention against tyranny (jus interventionis), right
to free choice (jus liberae electionis), and the right to protect one’s allies or
associates (jus protectionis sociorum).15 Thus, though Vitoria contested
Sepúlveda’s arguments for Spain’s titles to the West Indies that were based on
cultural superiority (i.e., the Aristotelian argument in favor of subjugating
weaker classes of humanity) or the imputed crimes of Indians against others,
such as cannibalism or human sacrifice, he agreed with Sepúlveda on the
matter of free trade and the free dissemination of the faith.16 Opposition to the
free passage of traders and missionaries were grounds for a just cause of war
(causus belli); moreover, Vitoria defended Spain’s right to intervene on behalf
of those Indians who had converted to Christianity. Thus, the presence of
Christian neophytes in indigenous communities effectively circumscribed them
within the tautology of legitimate violence. Yet questions on the time and
means of conversion brought into focus the loopholes through which universal
imperatives, such as the dissemination of Christ’s news in the known world,
could override local beliefs and forms of government (jus gentium). In this way,
messianic time and place makes its own claim to appropriation in the
consciousness of each potential neophyte.
What then of jus gentium when “the people” are caught up in the
process of its own destruction? Vitoria’s position on free trade and missionary
The longevity of these titles, just or not, continues to manifest itself. Consider the
“defense of the innocent” and “freedom from tyranny” arguments invoked by President
Obama before air strikes on Libya.
16 We—who is this “we”?—might refer to them as “crimes against humanity” nowadays.
15
151
work never engaged the question of the time and means of conversion;17 Vitoria
did not consider the moment or means of conversion as part of his larger
arguments on the legitimate use of force by foreign powers, but these were the
considerations at the heart of most approaches, including those of Bartolomé
de las Casas, Domingo de Soto and José de Acosta, to missionary work in the
Indies. Though Vitoria had called for restitution for injuries suffered by the
Indians in his letter to fray Miguel de Alarcos, especially in the case of Perú, he
did not go as far as Las Casas, whose calls for remedies for time lost addressed
the economy of conquista and its reliance on the habitus of love interest.
For Las Casas, free trade was little more than an excuse for armed
men to elbow their way into foreign ports.18 He tells the story of King
Manuel of Portugal’s armada that had been sent to India in 1500, with
reference to Juan de Barro’s Décadas (Historia de las indias 1. 173). In the
first section, Las Casas’s narrative voice conforms to the metalepsis of
venture capital, including approval for the division of ‘spiritual’ and
‘material and temporal’ agents among the Franciscans and mariners on the
Portuguese expedition. Everything, notes Las Casas, was done according to
canon law, including the necessary “requerimientos” with the formula that
would become even more notorious in the West Indies some twelve years
later. The Portuguese requerimiento not only made reference to Christ’s
More precisely, if Vitoria had made references to cases from the conquistas in the
Americas during his lectures in the 1530s, his students made no note of them.
18 There are more recent figures of trade at gunpoint. For example, Commodore
Matthew Perry’s turning of his ship’s cannon on Edo to open up Tokugawa Japan to
American goods.
17
152
“caridad y ley de amor” ‘charity and law of love,’ but also to the need to
respect “comercio o conmutación, que es el medio por el cual se adquiere y
trata y conserva la paz y amor entre todos los hombres, por ser este
comercio el fundamento de toda human policía” ‘commerce and exchange,
which is the means by which humanity procures, fulfills and conserves
peace and love, for commerce is the foundation of human civilization.’19 In
this way, Las Casas recognizes the ethical appeal to the free trade argument
and seems to validate it, as the exchanges of material goods would restrain
humanity within the bounds of civilized discourse.20 However, Las Casas
introduces the caveat, the impossibility of true dialogue in these fight or
flight situations: “pero con que los contratantes no difieran en ley y en
creencia de la verdad que cada uno es obligado a tener y creer de Dios, que
en tal caso les pudiesen hacer guerra cruel a fuego y a sangre” ‘as long as the
parties do not differ in religion and belief in the truth, for every one is
obligated to have and believe in God, in which case they could wage the
cruelest war (a sangre y a fuego).’ Las Casas opposes each individual
conscience against the threat of all out war (guerra a sangre y a fuego).
The phrasing of “no difieran en ley y en creecia de la verdad” establishes a
counterfactual; after all, it is because these peoples are not believers that
Kant will make similar claims in his essay “On the Perpetual Peace.”
Las Casas concludes by referring back to chapters 19, 22, 24 and 25 of the first book
of his Historia de las Indias to remind his readers that Portugal initiated the process
of “free” trade and evangelization in Africa (Guinea), which was later followed by
Castile.
19
20
153
they and their lands are pursued by these commercial enterprises with
impunity.
In the paragraph that follows, Las Casas lets loose the full wrath of
his ironic wit, observing that the Indians of the subcontinent received the
faith “a porradas” ‘by blows.’ Moreover, the “freedom to trade” was a
misnomer for material exchanges made under duress, for “aunque no
quisiesen, habían de usar el comercio y trocar sus cosas por las ajenas, si no
tenían necesidad dellas” ‘even if they did not wish to, they were to trade and
exchange their things for another’s, even if they had no need for them.’ Las
Casas concludes by suspecting that, much like their counterparts on the
other side of the Tordesillas line, the Portuguese sought out violent
resistance in order to justify the slavery of the indigenous inhabitants.21
As discussed in the first chapter, Acosta admired the Portuguese
model of conquest, and found significant differences between the
Portuguese and Castilian monarchs and the reach of their power, based
almost entirely on their stakeholdings in each imperial venture. Acosta
shared with Las Casas an acute understanding of the material motivations
behind the conquistadors’ actions in the Indies. Unlike Las Casas, however,
Acosta admired the cupiditas of the conquistadors and wished that
missionaries would be similarly motivated by the promise of spiritual
profits (i.e. Christian neophytes) in the Indies.
Recall Ferdinand’s admonitions to Dávila and crew to avoid the temptation to
subjugate all indigenous as indios de guerra.
21
154
Specifically, Acosta contemplated missionary work among
Barbarians whereas Las Casas speaks of working among Peoples. Though
Las Casas was obviously committed to converting Indians to the Catholic
faith, his emphasis on the coherence of the indigenous habitus, which he
insisted in the Apologética historia sumaria would not have been denied
God’s universal salvific grace, contemplated losses as a part of conversion
so that material remedies and spiritual satisfaction always had to be
accounted for, as it was impossible to speak of true conversion without loss
(though freely given). Las Casas envisions evangelization as an ongoing
appeal to the understanding, following Augustine’s famous image of the
convert smashing his idols, which culminates in the convert’s selective
rejection of that aspect of his former self.22
Reparations and satisfactions were owed to the infidel or the convert
for any violent intrusions on this subjective process of the understanding
and the will; book six of De unico modo elaborated the various material
Citing Augustine at length, Las Casas explores the pain of loss when it is done
voluntarily:
22
Nam sit, ut ait Augustinus in quodam sermone, leve cuique non est dimittere
propria et sectari aliena incerta, dimittere quod scias, quaerere quod ignores,
quis enim propria sine dolore deseruit aut sine lacrimis reliquit?
(De unico modo 466)
And let us consider also what Augustine says in a sermon: leaving one’s goods
to follow uncertain and alien things; leaving the known for the unknown is no
small burden for anyone. Who abandons his things without shedding tears?
If an abjuration of one’s former self and belongings is difficult, when done willingly,
Las Casas reiterates once and again, the pain of forced loss is incommensurate, a
permanent wound to the soul.
155
remedies and spiritual satisfactions required to compensate the indigenous
for the injuries they had received at the hands of their unlawful invasion.
However, to the extent that conversion was itself a disruptive process, the
indigenous always stood to lose part of themselves, as a community, that,
for Las Casas, even without an explicit profession of the Christian faith,
nonetheless might have benefited from universal salvific grace. The
questions for Las Casas, then, were whether knowledge of the true faith
could make up for all the losses suffered by the indigenous given the reality
of Christianity’s introduction in the Americas. At the beginning of his career
his response might have have been positive but by the time he wrote the
Tratado de las doce dudas, Las Casas could not imagine Christianity in the
Americas with the presence of European Christians without net losses,
material and spiritual, both to the indigenous and to the people of Spain
and their Sovereign.
Accounting for remedies and restitutions had been integral to Las
Casas’ thought since at least 1537 when he preached De unico modo and
started putting it into practice. Throughout De unico modo, Las Casas
repeated Christ’s injunctions against taking possessions along missionary
work or receiving gifts from converts because the material exchanges could
easily confuse potential neophytes on the true objectives of the mission.23
23
Las Casas paraphrases Christ as follows,
Christus etiam prohibuit Evangelii sui promulgatoribus ne possiderent
aurum vel argentum nec pecuniam [et] multo fortius ne ab his, quibus
156
Moreover, the prohibition against material accumulation before, during or
after missionary work would also condition preachers to avoid the
(con)fusion of caritas and cupiditas. The Dominican’s insistence on
decoupling free trade and evangelization later received the most vociferous
response from José de Acosta.
Acosta’s latter day accounting for new souls in the Indies did not
reckon with indigenous losses and referred to free evangelization and trade
collectively as activities that merited armed protection. As Acosta found
indigenous societies to be lacking in general, indigenous interactions with
Christianity and its believers, in whatever guise, would always provide these
indigenous individuals with a net gain in material and spiritual terms, even
if they had suffered material and moral injuries. Thus, the merchant
capitalists of Iberia were commendable, admirable even, because they
pursued profit with zeal to the ends of the earth. In order for them to make
a profit, the merchant capitalists had to supplement the areas of indigenous
life that were lacking, i.e. “la vida de puliçía” ‘civilized life.’ If only
missionaries would be similarly inspired to fill in the gaps of indigenous
spirituality!
praedicaturi erant, non solum ut non violenter raperent aut ab invitis
tollerent, verum etiam nec ab volentibus libenter dare acciperent. (416)
Christ prohibited the preachers of the Gospel from carrying gold, silver
or money; and not only were they not to rob the men whom they came
to preach, or take anything against their will, but also they were not to
accept any thing that [the gentiles] would willingly give them.
157
In what moral universe would merchants become models for
missionaries? For Acosta’s comparison to work, the values of spiritual and
material gains would have to be interchangeable credits and debits in the
parallel columns of the accounting system developed by humanist
merchants such as Bernardino Cotrugli in 15th century Italy. Not only
would Acosta rehabilitate the synonymous use of caritas and cupiditas,
which had fallen into disrepute by the influence of Las Casas, but cupiditas
would become exemplary for the ambitions of caritas:
Iam illud multum mouere nos debet, quod videmus ad gentes
profundi sermonis, & ignotae linguae homines penetrare lucrispe,
nec deterreri barbarie inmensa, sed universa mercium gratia
lustrare, […] augeant tam longam, & pericolosam peregrinationem
avidissime suscipiunt, ut profecto admirabile sit omnes pene por
utriusque Oceani, omnes finus orbis terrarum stationibus nauium
Hispaniensium teneri, omnes Indorum Satrapas cum nostris
mercatoribus, & nautis commercium habere. At qui pretiosissimas
merces quaerimus animas Dei imagine insignes, qui lucra non
incerta, aut breuia; sed aeterna in coelis spetamus, linguae
difficultatem, locorum asperitate causamur.
An argument that ought to stir [the] zeal of [missionaries], is to
observe the people in this century who are reaching the unreached
language groups and unknown tribes for the hope of becoming rich.
They are not scared off by the most aggressive Barbarians, rather
they risk all to take them their business offers and their wares [...] All
the [men] (omnes) and [Satraps, provincial lords] (Satrapas) of the
Indies now trade with our merchants and our navigators. So there is
no reason, then, why we, who are looking for much more precious
goods, that is to say the souls that bear the image of God, and
expecting no uncertain or short-term profit, but the eternal heavenly
kind, should be discouraged by the difficulty of the language and the
places. 24 (I. Ix. 29-30)
I have changed McIntosh’s translation of “omnes Indorum Satrapas” ‘men and
Satraps of the Indies’ to more accurately reflect the terms used by Acosta to describe
24
158
Acosta can draw parallels between mercantilism and missionary work
because the equivalence between free trade and evangelization were taken
for granted by most authors before him, including, notably, Vitoria.
However, Acosta’s praise for merchants and their pursuit of profits as
paeans to be emulated by missionaries offers a vociferous response to his
greatest intellectual competitor, Father Las Casas, and this author's ironic
and at times disparaging treatment of drawing comparisons between what
were, to the mind of the Dominican friar, incommensurate moral actions
and passions that did not deserve equal treatment under the law.
Acosta was not one to deny what he called the “excesses of zeal” in
the pursuit of material or spiritual profit, rather he advocated in favor of
humanitarian reform and efficiency for a universal economic and spiritual
system that he viewed as a done deal. His importance to our story of the
union between love, violence and interest, resides in his popularity among
his contemporaries throughout Europe and his intellectual and material
legacy in the apologetics of empire. Like the work of Las Casas, Acosta’s
oeuvre, especially his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1589) was
influential among his contemporaries and in posterity. Yet before we turn
once more to Acosta's theology of indigenous liberation, we must first
consider its position relative to Catholic thought on salvation and freedom.
indigenous forms of self-government. Acosta’s use of the generic “men” and the
alienating term satraps, the lords of provinces in the Persian empire, leave little doubt
as to his views on indigenous sovereignty in the context of Christian empire.
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Define Liberty
Porque son libres, “because they are free.” Bartolomé de las Casas
repeats this refrain time and again as he condemns the encomienda and the
laws of conquest throughout the Historia de las Indias. But what can he
mean by libres? Let us recall Cyprian’s (in)famous aphorism extra
ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church there is no salvation).25 Does
freedom outside of the Church equal damnation? For gentiles born during
periods thought to be governed by natural law (Adam to Moses) and
written, Mosaic law (Moses to Christ), their implicit understanding of God
would be enough; this understanding would be made manifest if their laws
and customs followed the precepts of natural law. However, is an implicit
faith in God enough after the coming of Christ and the law of grace? How
about peoples who had lived since Christ’s first coming without exposure to
the Good News? Could entire peoples be compared to the savage child of
Aquinas’ conundrum?26 Moreover, following a thorough catechism, what
rational human being would reject the love of Christ?
Many are the authors who have spilled ink on the thorny question of exclusion in
Cyprian’s phrasing. A more recent consensus, shared by the likes of Gutiérrez,
González Ruiz and Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) emphasize the unity of the
church as a route to salvation. However, on the basis of Cyprian’s phrase, writers in
the Augustinian tradition created a stark delineation between Christians and nonChristians. For an understanding of Thomistic thought on universal salvation see
Capéran’s classic Le problème du salut des infidèles.
26 In De Veritate, Aquinas posits the problem of the savage child: raised among
barbarians, but during the time of the law of grace, is this individual shut out from
God’s salvific grace? For Aquinas, if the child follows natural reason in search of the
good, upon attaining the age of reason, God, by some extraordinary measure, would
25
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These weighty questions, which had become quasi hypothetical in
Scholasticism’s heyday when Thomas Aquinas first posited his exemplum of
the savage child aquiring reason, became an urgent matter in the sixteenth
century (De veritate. q14, a.11, ad.1). As written, the formula of the
requerimiento may have assumed the rational intelligence of the
indigenous, as Muldoon has proposed. However, Muldoon’s proposition is
overly generous in his assesment of the options given to the indigenous.
After all, refusal to submit to the Pontiff and monarchs was met with
enslavement and death, punishments worthy of naturally born slaves,
defined in the Aritotelian tradition as irrational beings. Does it follow, then,
that refusal to submit is a sign of the potential new subject’s lack of reason?
Can one refuse the gratuitous love of Christ rationally?
As practiced, the requerimiento treated the indigenous as the
violators of natural law, the “savages and sub-humans” who, in the
evangelization schemes put forward by humanists such as Juan Ginés de
Sepúlveda, Martin Fernández de Enciso, and González de Oviedo were
headed straight for damnation; saving the otherwise damned through
violence was the obligation of every good Christian. 27 Neither author
contemplated the possibility of a rational rejection to Christianity since they
intervene (in Opera omnia q. 14, a. 11, ad. 1). But, how? And if God would use
extraordinary measures for one savage child, what of a multitude?
27 Ginés de Sepúlveda’s most vehement arguments in favor of violent evangelization
were articulated in his Apologia, which is earlier than the Democrates alter, his best
known work. In the Historia general de Indias, González de Oviedo uses even more
demeaning language to deny rational thought to the indigenous.
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failed to articulate a rational, indigenous subject. Indeed, the most complex
articulations of God’s universal salvific grace belong to those authors who
seriously engage with the indigenous as rational interlocutors.
Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto engaged in nuanced
discussions of time, the law(s) and the possibilities of God’s universal
salvific grace. 28 For Vitoria, the horrific means of evangelization in the
Indies had spoiled indigenous exposure to Christianity. Thus, the
indigenous could not be accused of willfully ignoring Christian precepts.
Moreover, indigenous practices and beliefs displayed a natural
understanding of God so that the possibility of salvation remained open to
them even if they did not express explicit faith in Christ.
For Las Casas, God’s universal salvific grace was denied to none, not
even for those without the Church: those who had not professed freely
their faith in Christ and those who had no exposure to Christ’s teaching.
Placing limits on God’s mercy was the height of arrogance; arrogating
knowledge of God’s divine plan an affront to God’s universal salvific will. 29
He defended the right of all peoples to make “universal truth claims” in
good conscience and to persist in free dissent of competing claims,
including the claims of Catholicism that he held as his own (Dussel 6-7).
Both jurists belong to the modern scholastic tradition of the School of Salamanca,
which also includes Francisco Suárez, whose Disputationes proved essential to the
thought of Giambattista Vico.
29 See Dussel’s “Alterity and Modernity” for a reading of Las Casa’s entire body of work
as squarely at odds with modernity and European imperialism. For an opposing
viewpoint, based almost entirely on the early work of Las Casas, see Castro’s Another
Face of Imperialism.
28
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The ramifications of this radical position were many, calling into question
the moral and legal validity of the encomienda system, but also, and more
importantly, a defense of indigenous sovereignty that emphasized not only
an explicit expression of the consensus of the people to be governed but also
for their “universal truth claims” to enter in a true dialogue with their
would-be overlords.30
Las Casas traces the origin of the encomienda to a faulty reading of
Isabel of Castile’s last wishes for the evangelization of the native inhabitants
of the Islas and Tierra Firme. The letter is worth quoting extensively as it
makes policy for the indigenous based on her understanding of libre31:
Por cuanto el Rey, mi señor é yo, por la Instrucción que
mandamos dar á don frey Nicolás de Ovando, comendador
mayor de Alcántara, al tiempo que fue por nuestro Gobernador
á las islas y tierra firme del mar Océano, hobimos mandado
que los indios vecinos y moradores de la isla Española fuesen
libres y no subjetos á servidumbre, según más largamente en
la dicha Instrucción se contiene, y agora soy informada que, á
causa de la mucha libertad que los dichos tienen, huyen y se
apartan de la conversación y comunicación de los cristianos,
por manera que, áun queriéndoles pagar sus jornales, no
quieren trabajar y andan vagabundos, ni ménos los pueden
haber para los doctrinar y traer á que se conviertan á nuestra
sancta fe católica, y que, á esta causa, los cristianos que están
en la dicha isla, y viven y moran en ella, no hallan quien
trabaje en sus granjerías y mantenimientos, ni les ayudan á
sacar ni coger el oro que hay en la dicha isla, de que á los unos
30 Consider, as an example, the liberal position of John Rawls who cannot contemplate
a dialogue among competing universal truth claims that does not leave benevolence at
a loss on how to proceed (166-7, 417). The contingency of benevolence on the
acceptance of Western-held universal truth claims privileges the refusal of one party to
dialogue.
31 Note that Hanke attributes this line of reasoning to Fray Bernardino de Mesa, King
Ferdinand’s confessor (23). However, the discourse of indigenous idleness and the
economy of liberty precedes the Laws of Burgos by several years, having been
articulated and promulgated by Isabel of Castile in December 1503.
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y a los otros viene perjuicio. Y porque nos deseamos que los
dichos se conviertan á nuestra sancta fe católica, y que sean
doctrinados en las cosas della, y porque esto se podría mejor
facer comunicando los dichos indios con los cristianos que en
la dicha isla están, y andando tratando con ellos, y ayudando
los unos á los otros, para que la dicha isla se labre, y pueble, y
aumenten los frutos della, y se coja el oro que en ella hobiere,
para que estos mis reinos, y los vecinos dellos, sean
aprovechados, mandé dar esta mi Carta, en la dicha razón.
Because my King, my lord and I, in the Instructions that we
sent to Sir Nicolás de Ovando, friar, knight commander of
Alcantara, when he was our Governor of the islands and
mainland of the Ocean, had ordered that the indios vecinos
and inhabitants of the Hispaniola were free and not subject to
bondage, as outlined in the aforementioned Instructions, I am
now informed that, because they enjoy too much liberty, they
escape and avoid conversation and communication with the
Christians. Even when offered wages, they do not wish to work
and live like vagabonds, and so they cannot be found in order
to catechize them so that they may convert to our holy catholic
faith. For this reason, the Christians who are on this island,
and live and reside there, cannot find anyone to work on their
farms and their upkeep, and they do not help them to pan and
mine for the gold on the island, which is perjudicial to all. And
because we wish the aforementioned to convert to our holy
catholic faith, and know its tenets, and because this can best
be achieved by [enforcing] communication between the
Indians and the Christians, who try to reach out to them, on
that island, helping one another so that the island be
cultivated, and populated, and fruitful, and so that the gold
there be collected. So that these my kingdoms, and the
neighboring ones, will benefit, I gave my reasons in this Letter.
This first section of the letter offers an economy of liberty (too much, not
enough) that favors productive communication and conversation. There
must be usfruct in exchanges between the indigenous and the “Christians”;
literally and figuratively, the land must be cultivated and populated; refusal
to work, especially when there are wages to be had, is another sign of too
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much freedom. An excess of liberty would be defined by Isabel of Castile as
choosing not to listen to Christian doctrine, deciding not to live among
Spanish Christians and not to work for them in the fields or in the mines.
The power to decide one’s residence, one’s means of sustenance or one’s
interlocutors is excessive. She argues that this refusal to work, trade
(tratar) and cohabit in the same place is detrimental to both parties,
Indians and Spanish alike. Isabel follows her exposition of the problem with
an order for the following remedies to be put in place immediately:
Por la cual mando á vos, el dicho nuestro Gobernador, que, del
día que esta mi Carta viéredes en adelante, compelais y
apremieis a los dichos indios, que traten y conversen con los
cristianos de la dicha isla y trabajen en sus edificios, en coger y
sacar oro y otros metales, y en facer granjerías y
mantenimientos para los cristianos vecinos y moradores de la
dicha isla, y fagais pagar á cada uno, el dia que trabajare, el
jornal y mantenimiento, que, según la calidad de la tierra, y de
la persona, y del oficio, vos pareciere que debieren haber,
mandando á cada Cacique que tenga cargo de cierto numero de
los dichos indios, para que los haga ir á trabajar donde fuere
menester, y para que, las fiestas y días que pareciere, se junten
á oir y ser doctrinados en las cosas de la fe en los lugares
deputados para que cada Cacique acuda con el número de
indios que vos les señaláredes […]
For this reason I order you, our aforementioned Governor,
henceforth upon receipt of this Letter, to compel and force
these Indians to trade and converse with the Christians on that
island and to work in their buildings, to collect gold and other
metals, and to labor in farms and their upkeep for the
Christian vecinos and inhabitants on that island. And you shall
ensure that each Indian receive a wage for each day of work,
according to the qualities of the land, and the persons, and the
stations you think they should have. [To this end,] order each
cacique to keep a certain number of Indians under his charge,
to make sure they work where they are needed, and so that, on
the feasts and holidays they see fit, to gather the Indians to
listen to matters of the faith in the designated places for each
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cacique to meet there with the number of Indians designated
by you […]
This letter is the first instance of the queen making an explicit recourse to
indirect rule, i.e., keeping existing, indigenous power structures in place to
the extent that they can be productive for the imperial enterprise. She also
recognized their authority to uphold the “conversation,” productively. Thus,
Isabel charges native elites with the distribution of tasks for the Indians
under their stewardship and for ensuring the presence of the same to listen
and receive instruction in the Catholic faith. She explicitly calls for the
reduction of the Indians’ liberty, excessive in her view, in exchange for
wages and instruction in the Catholic faith. In the latter half of the letter,
Isabel also makes provisions for the basic living conditions and safety of her
new indigenous subjects. They are not to be treated as siervos (slaves) but
as free subjects, just not as free as they were before.
Isabel’s economy of liberty will be known by another name in the
seventeenth century, i.e. the social contract. Articulation of the social
contract has been attributed to the likes of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau;
authors who speak of power and freedom of subjects in relation to the
Sovereign, but not in terms of labor or the means of production.32 At the
heart of the enlightened models of the social contract lies the exchange,
tacit or explicit, of an excess of liberty for the rule of the sovereign as a
Articulated in the form of government either by the rule of a monarch or by majority
rule.
32
166
means of protection. What goes missing from the “rights” talk of the
Enlightenment is the explicit consideration of labor and time in the
exchange between individual subjects and the sovereign. Yet Isabel’s letter
to a local magistrate in the Indies could not be more clear on the matter of
labor and time. In this lesser known imperial formula of the early sixteenth
century, the social contract emerges as a business contract. It is a negocio,
recalling the Latin etymology for “business,” (busy-ness); it is the negation
of otium. It obligates the excessively free to make productive use of their
time in the service of empire in return for the benefits of a new political
order.
Isabel’s formulation, driven by the pragmatic concerns of
subjugating new subjects, emphasizes another aspect of the social contract
that is lost in later treatments: enforcement of the new political order on
the indigenous entails losses of their lives and a life lived in hardship and
fear. It is imposible to overstate the importance of Isabel’s
acknowledgement of indigenous resistance to Spanish “benevolence.” The
Indians’ refusal to concede defeat exposes the ideological lacunae, in the
sense used by Althusser, in the forced reconciliation between caritas and
cupiditas.33
In Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser argues that ideology is constructed in
the relations between what is said and what remains unsaid. The ‘gaps’ “lacunae” in
Isabel of Castile’s ideology of “liberty” are exposed when she admits to her new
subjects’ resistance to coercion.
33
167
If Las Casas saw in Isabel’s letter her admission, however slight, of
the indigenous will to live without the Spanish political order, he reserves
judgement in this section of the Historia de las Indias. Instead, Las Casas
charges the Spanish sovereigns with ignorance about the true conditions of
their new subjects. In subsequent chapters Las Casas argues that Isabel’s
last order to Nicolás de Ovando, her representative, was grossly
misinterpreted, in bad faith, by her Spanish subjects in the Indies.
However, Las Casas does underscore that in effect, “en la realidad de la
verdad,” the obligation to inhabit in repartimientos was a sentence of
slavery in perpetuity: “y así los dio, en la realidad de la verdad,
perpetuamente por esclavos, pues no tuvieron libre voluntad para hacer de
sí nada o algo, sino donde la crueldad y codicia de los españoles quería
echarles” ‘and so she gave them [the Indians], really and truly, into slavery
for perpetuity, for they did not have free will to do anything or nothing with
themselves, but what the cruelty and will of the Spanish wanted for them.’
Las Casas’ protestations of Isabel’s, then Fernando’s, then Juana’s
ignorance about these true conditions are made in the conditional form:
had they known the truth, they would have immediately sought to remedy
the situation.
The struggle to overcome invincible ignorance cuts both ways, for
subjects and Sovereigns. Yet when it comes to liability and culpability, Las
Casas reasserts the responsibility of the general partners who participate in
an “advisory” role: “principales autem in delictis sunt praecipientes seu
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mandantes et hi qui dant consilium patrandi maleficium” “for the main
guilty parties are those who give orders, and those who advise evil” (De
unico vocationis modo 532). The limited partnerships that serve to protect
the pooled assets of the larger fund and the more powerful partners do not,
as Las Casas asserts, work for salvation. However, his patience wears thin
with Charles I and Philip II. He replaces his ironic references to the
monarchs’ ignorance with protests of his increasing despair at the
Sovereign’s delay, suspected as malicious, in its actions or inaction to
remedy the loss of life and liberty of the indigenous.
Increasingly, the positivist hold of secular law held sway over the
moral theology written in Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares with the
emergence of probabilism as a moral system. With probabilism, if a
Christian subject is in doubt about the lawfulness or unlawfulness of an
action, it is permissible (i.e., not sinful) to follow a solidly probable opinion
in favor of liberty even though the opposing view is more probable. This
position, favored by Francisco Suárez in the Disputationes and defined by
Bartolomé Medina (1527-80) in his “Expositio 1am 2ae S. Thomae,” placed
the enforcement power of absolution in peril (see Schüssler On the
Anatomy of Probabilism). Moreover, as theorists of moral theology, they
skirted the questions of political theology that had been raised, time and
again, by Las Casas over the years: how are Christians to act when one
Christian Sovereign’s doubts are enacted into law? How could they fail to
act when they could no longer, in good faith, claim ignorance? And if one
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chooses to follow the probable position in favor of liberty, isn’t one morally
obligated, politically obligated, as a ruler enforcing a “vida de puliçía,” ‘the
political life,’ to ask: the liberty of whom?
In his campaign for remedies, Las Casas narrates iterations of origins
to the injustices suffered by Indians, Africans, and Indians of the
subcontinent. If there is truth to Chakrabarty's contention in Habitations of
Modernity, that origins—especially violent origins that give way to
modernization processes—lure the intellectual into redacting their
narration, especially when the intellectual feels implicated in the legal
conservation, through state powers, of that foundational violence, what can
we make of Las Casas repeatedly indicating one or another event as the
origin of systematic oppression, up to his very present (31)?
What’s Free Trade Got to Do with It?
As we saw in Chapter 2, by explicitly outlining the paternalistic goals of
civilizing the indigenous so that they could lead a ‘political life,’ the 1573
Ordenanzas fully endorsed the Aristotelian binary of civilized vs. barbaric that
had been promoted vociferously by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. As Hanke
observes, though Las Casas had never approved of Aristotelian doctrine, he
responded to the imputations of barbarism against the Indians by methodically
demonstrating evidence of indigenous political life in his Apologetica historia
sumaria.
170
Acosta, on the other hand, formally aligned himself with Sepúlveda´s
Aristotelian arguments even as he claimed disagreement with the Dominican
on the just causes of war. “Ut enim Barbari," ‘The Barbarians,’ according to
Acosta,
veluti mixta humana & ferina natura constant, ut moribus non
tam homines, quam hominum monstra videantur sic quae cum
illis institutenda est consuetudo, partim humana & liberalis,
partim subhorrida, & ferox sit, necesse est, usque; dum nativa illa
sua feritate deposita, paulatim mansuescere incipiant, & ad
disciplinam humanitatemque traduci.
display a nature that appears to be a mixture of the wild animal
and the human being, and their customs are such that they
appear to be human monsters rather than humans as such. So we
have to begin a treatment of them that is partly human and partly
animal, until they begin, little by little, to lay down their native
wildness, and become docile and accustom themselves to
discipline in proper human customs. (II, xii)
The imposition of sedentary life, the reducciones, the cultivation of wheat,
grapes for wine and olives for oil, the wearing of shoes, had all been benefits of
“poliçía” and Christianity as outlined in the 1573 Ordenanzas, with whose
implementation in Perú, under Viceroy Toledo, Acosta was familiar.34
Monstrosity and savagery go hand in hand with a litany of the good life in law
one hundred and forty one:
y los tenemos en paz para que no se maten ny coman ni sacrifiquen
como en algunas partes se hazia y puedan andar seguros por todos
los caminos tratar y contratar y comerçiar aseles ensenado puliçia
visten y calçan y tienen otros muchos bienes que antes les heran
prohibidos aseles quitado las cargas y serbidumbres aseles dado vso
de pan vino azeyte y otros muchos mantenimientos paño seda lienço
cauallos ganados herramientas armas [...] y que de todos estos
Viceroy Toledo's reforms (1569) pre date the Ordenanzas and were a model for the
laws promulgated by the Consejo de Indias in 1573.
34
171
bienes goçaran los que vinieren a conoçimiento de nuestra santa fee
catholica y a nuestra obediencia [...]
And we have pacified them so that they do not kill or eat or sacrifice
one another as they did in the past. And they can travel and trade
and do business on the roads, safely; we have taught them to live in
polite society. They dress and wear shoes and have other goods that
were previously prohibited to them. We have removed their burdens
and servitude and given them the custom of [eating and drinking]
bread, wine and oil and other sustenances. Cloth, linen, horses,
livestock, tools and weapons [...] and they will enjoy all these
benefits if they come to the knowledge of our holy catholic faith and
to our obedience [...]
Like Toledo's push to use native informants in an effort to delegitimize the
Incas of Peru and, thus, legitimate the Spanish as liberators of native tyranny,
the law combines a narrative of past grievances, such as monstrosity
(cannibalism) and servitude, with an enumeration of material and spiritual
benefits, which include an enforced ‘peace’ that is conducive to free trade.
Obeying the law, becoming a subject, then, entailed a process of self-effacement
and scripting: accepting the imputed monstrosity, reifying the practices and
traits associated with it, rejecting them, learning to value the temporal and
spiritual ‘benefits’ of the new regime. Becoming ‘civilized’ includes evaluating
self-interest—temporal and spiritual—within this new paradigm. Thus,
Acosta's need to ‘tame monstrosity’ echoes the sentiment and letter of the law
that promises benefits and punishment (i.e., the ‘carrot and stick’) to ferocious
men. At the same time, Acosta subscribes to Vitoria's analysis of the just causes
of war so that his justification for the Spanish presence in the Indies remains
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free trade and evangelization, whereas dominion is explored in Aristotelian
terms.
In the first and second books of De procuranda indorum salute, Acosta
recalls the arguments of Vitoria, Sepúlveda and Las Casas to his readers. He
summarizes and approves of Vitoria's reasoning thus:
Praeter hanc causam acceptae iniuriae, aut violati iuris gentium,
nullum nostri maiores iustam agnoveruntam, neque; gloria
quaerendae, neque; cumulandarum opum, neque; amplificandi
dominatus, neque vero religionis propagandae. Quotquot ver
nolaesi arma sumpserunt, eos praedonis potius, qua milites
vocitandos cenfuerunt. (II.iv)
Without this cause of harm received or the violation of human
rights, our peers did not recognize any other form that was
deemed a just cause. A just cause cannot be for gaining honor,
nor for the accumulation of wealth, nor for extending dominion,
not even that of propagating holy religion. Those who, not having
received any type of harm but yet took up arms, were judged to be
more worthy of the name bandits than of soldiers.
Yet Acosta will argue vociferously that the conquistadors are not, in fact,
bandits even though their unbridled Greed may have given cause for such an
imputation. Moreover, he treats Spanish dominion as a fait accompli and
accuses Las Casas, though never by name, of playing temporal and spiritual
powers against each other.
Acosta condemns unbridled Greed in the actions of the conquistadors
and missionaries who have succumbed to the corrupting influence of riches in
the Indies (I.xi). Self criticism, Acosta argues, would recognize that “plusque
operae coligendo argento ponamos, quam in acquirendo populo Dei” ‘we are
more involved in money-making than gaining people for God,’ a self-serving
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attitude that has led the ‘Barbarians’ “barbari” to conclude, understandably,
“ne vaenale putent barbari esse Evangelium, venalia Sacramenta, neque;
animas nobis curae esse sed nummum” ‘that we charge for the Gospel and the
sacraments and that we only care for the money and not for their souls’ (34).
Instead of self-interest and the pursuit of profits, missionaries and explorers
should succumb to love toward the Barbarians as the motivating force behind
evangelization (I.vii). Indeed, Acosta, citing Chrysostom, argues that the
rewards for converting a soul are much greater than riches (I.iv). Following the
examples of the gospels and patristic authorities, Acosta likens souls to riches.
Thus, it is only when self-interest is wed to love for the other that Acosta feels
that he can properly speak of sanctified “love interest,” without contradiction.
At the same time, although Acosta denies acting out of self-interest in
the pursuit of temporal riches, he admires entrepreneurs and reiterates the
material benefits (the civilizing of hominum monstra) enjoyed by the Indians.
Entrepreneurial zeal thus provides a model for missionary work, offers the
material benefits for indigenous conversion and civilization, but, in excess,
corrupts and is materially and spiritually inefficient. The effects of unbridled
greed have been to strip the Indies of their "ancient prosperity" and to diminish
the Indian population (I.xiii).
Acosta then levels his greatest moral attacks not against the
conquistadors but against Father Las Casas and his adherents. In his discussion
of the proper means for conversion, he recognizes that the ‘gospel of peace’ and
‘sword of war’ joined together are a paradox, but it is love and, perhaps, a leap
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of the imagination that are able to unite them even when the understanding
cannot (II.i). In this way, though he subscribes fully to Vitoria's argumentation
on the just causes of war and titles of dominion, he will deny the salience of
peaceful evangelization that Las Casas, taking the first apostles as his model,
outlined in De unico modo.
Acosta rejects evangelization in the manner of the Apostles on two
counts: peaceful evangelization and its associated martyrdom is wasteful in the
West Indies; the Indians are inferior to the ancient pagans in culture and
rational thought, thus Indians are more inspired to belief than their Greek and
Roman counterparts but their 'ungodly' habits are more difficult to extirpate.
Acosta attributes the dearth of miracles in evangelization campaigns of the
Indies to the lack of rational thought among the indigenous rather than a
manifestation of the doctrineros’ impurity. In contrast, the intellectual rigors of
the Greek and Romans posed a formidable challenge to the humble apostles,
rendering miracles a necessity to overcome disbelief and instill faith (II.x).
Acosta's examples of “wasteful” martyrdom include the deaths of priests
in La Florida (II.viii). He goes into a cost-benefit analysis of martyrdom in
greater detail, and condemns what he perceives to be the self-interest of
martyrdom seekers. They show a lack of prudence for “specie iustitiae
sanctioris committere, ut salutem abijcias, & alienam nihilo amplius compares”
‘under the guise of greater holiness [...they nonetheless] gain no lives from it.’
Indeed, nothing is more wasteful than becoming the object of monstrous
anthropophagi, which would not result in ‘true martyrdom.’ What, then,
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constitutes a ‘true’ as opposed to a ‘false’ martyrdom? Acosta's rejection of
martyrdom in the Americas could not have been expressed in more visceral
terms:
Neque vero ab istis Martyrium expectandum est, quae fortasis
spes tantum discrimen levaret, non enim pro Fide, pro Christo,
pro Religione moriendum est: Sed ut vel Suauiores epulas de te
praebas, quod Brasiliensibus, & toti Septentrionali orae huius
orbis vulgare est, vel spolium praebeas barbaris elegans, vel
denique; quia visus es numquam, & quid in te sibi liceat, experiri
iuvat.
And it is not as if a true martyrdom would await us, which would
be a great relief in such labors. For death would not come to us
for the Faith, for Christ, or for our religion, but rather to make us
a more succulent morsel for their palate, as is common in Brazil
and in all the northern coasts of the New World, or to become a
hunting-trophy for them. Or, finally, if they had not seen a
foreigner [before] to experiment and see what they could do to us.
Let us put aside the objections of the missionaries who died in precisely the
manner derided by Acosta and were later canonized for their martyrdom by the
church. Acosta's reasoning shows an almost utilitarian disdain for the deaths of
his brethren in Christ, unless they could maximize (i.e., scale) the number of
neophytes achieved per death. Yet Acosta not only frowns upon martyrdom in
quantitative terms. He analyzes the efficiency of martyrdom based on the
lesser worth of the neophytes' souls. Miracles and martyrdom are wasted on the
neophytes of the West Indies.
Having refuted the arguments for peaceful evangelization with his cost
benefit-analysis, Acosta proceeds to analyze the other two options for
evangelization: to preach among those who ‘are already subjected justly or
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unjustly to the Christian princes’ or to seek out new converts among those who
have remained beyond contact, with a garrison of soldiers for an escort. Acosta
commends both options. The greatest confusion in his thought emerges
precisely in the area of dispelling doubts on the viability of conversion among
those ‘already subjected justly or unjustly.’ Las Casas had explored such doubts
to the ultimate logical consequences in the Tratado de las doce dudas (1562).
Acosta pursues Las Casas with a relentless circular logic where prudent
evangelization (i.e., under the protection of the state) is the ultimate telos.
Thus, the Crown and Church must uphold their partnership, even if past
actions were criminal. We saw in the first chapter how venture capital engages
its partners in a metalepsis of the future; post 1573, the same can be said for
Acosta's attitude toward the past. Acosta laments that Las Casas could have
promoted such a schism between the Crown and the Church. It was reckless
and inefficient advocacy to demand the restoration of Peru, and all of the Indies
under Spanish imperium, to their native lords. Himself a Spanish subject, the
doubts of Las Casas on the mortal sin of the Spanish sovereigns and their
subjects, unless they abandoned the Indies, might have weighed heavily on
Acosta’s conscience. Yet they were weighted on a merchant’s scale, much like
Charles I’s burdens of conscience.
Acosta’s arguments, doubts no longer, sought shelter in the fait
accompli and the state's constituted powers—de facto or de iure—to protect the
already converted (one of Vitoria's just titles of war) at any cost:
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Nihil perinde instructioni, & saluti Indorum nocere compertum est,
atque; perversam quandam, & malignam potestatum temporalis, &
spiritualis concertationem, aut imminutionem, aut quoquomodo
offensionem. Atque; ut de caeteris modo magistratibus saecularibus
taccamus, certe graviter errat quidam specie fortasse pietatis, ius
regium, & administrationem vocantes in dubium, quarendentes
interdum, quo titulo, & iure Hispani dominentur Indis? Num
haeredutarui iure ad bis devoluti sint, an bello iusto subiecti?
It is a well known fact that nothing causes such damage in the
instruction and the spiritual welfare of the Indians than the
competition between the two powers, i.e., the temporal and spiritual,
and the deterioration of relationships or any other type of struggle
with the civil powers. Let us leave aside for the momento other types
of secular magistrates, and focus on those who, under the guise of
piety, cast doubt upon the right of our kings and their government
and administration. They are the ones who stir up disputes over the
rights and terms through which the Spaniards dominate the Indians,
and the question of whether Indians are just an inheritance
transferred from their princes to ours, or if we have merely
conquered them through a just war. (II.xi)
Acosta then justifies his refusal to pursue the logical consequences of reasoning
on the manner, means and time of conversion to a newfound expediency. Even
though the Crown had sought to avoid conquest at all costs, by insisting on the
‘new methods’ for exploration, discovery, and pacification, Acosta concedes
merum imperium with little thought toward restitution. This would imply that
Acosta felt there was no moral risk for preachers involved in forced
conversions, in illegal encomiendas or a continued partnership with an unjust
temporal power. Spiritual profits for the Church trump any other
consideration:
Quae sane disputatio pertinet, ut administrationis Indicae, vel
tollatur vel certe debilitetur autoritas, quo semel si gradus fiat,
quanta sit futura pernicies, quae perturbatio rerum omnium
consequatur, dici vix potest. Neque; vero id ego modo suscipiam, ut
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bella, bellorumque; gestorum raciones defendam, atque omnes illos
superiorum temporum turbines. Illud religiose & utiliter moneo non
oportere in hac causa amplius disceptare, sed veluti praescriptum
iam sit, optima fide agere debere Christi Servum.
These sorts of polemics might lead us to abandon the dominion or
the administration of the Indians, or, at the very least, greatly
debilitate our control over them. And if we begin to yield to these
sorts of opinions, and we do not reprimand them with a firm hand,
we cannot say what sort of evils and universal ruin may follow, and
the grievous perturbation and disorder in everything. Now it is not
that I am proposing here to defend the wars of the past and all that
happened through them nor all the revolutions and disturbances
that have taken place, but I am warning as a supremely useful
religious piece of advice that it is not worth while going on arguing
over this matter, but rather the servant of Christ in good faith should
take it as a fait accompli. (Emphasis mine)
Writing almost two decades after the deaths of the Incas of Vilcabamba, Titu
Cussi Yupanqui and Tupac Amaru, Acosta does not deny the possibility of a
return to original rule but rather argues against its worth: in time, in labor and
in (good) conscience. Like the contingency plans made law in the 1573
Ordenanzas, what Acosta offers his brethren in Christ are ramifications for
their (im)proper conduct and speech in the Indies. The pursuit of truth and
justice, a Sovereign’s examination of conscience, or that of his subjects, these
are all happenstance for insurgency. The risk of insurgency and apostasy were
unacceptable among the gamut of risks that could or even ought to be taken,
though merchants and conquistadors should be commended for taking risks to
their lives and livelihoods in pursuit of profits.
Without a doubt, it is ironic that a Jesuit, professed in the tradition of
Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, would advocate, wholeheartedly, against
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examinations of conscience. Or, to be more precise, Acosta relegated the matter
of conquista, love and interest to a ‘polemic’ (disputatio), purging it of the
urgency of the dubium that, for Las Casas and his followers, posed the
existential threat to all those who had profited from the venture capital
enterprise known as conquista.
In Acosta’s critique and prescriptions for reform, Philip II could once
again indulge in the doubt of a Sovereign, though it would be reified by the
discourse of polemic. Acosta was critical of what the conquest had been, but his
solutions were logical extensions of the practice of conquista. However, the
memory of the lascasian treatment of the Sovereign’s doubt and indigenous
freedom remained alive and well in the Viceroyalty of Peru. The following
chapter is dedicated to the indigenous reception of the ambivalence inherent to
the venture capitalist model of conquista, beginning with the counter-offer
made to Philip II in 1561 by the curacas of Peru. To this day, the question
remains: Who are the true Christians? What is a true Christian?
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Chapter Four
The Bidding of Empire: the Curacas Negotiate Dominion with Philip II
En nombre de los indios del Perú, contra
la perpetuidad; y ofrecen servir con lo
mismo que los españoles y cien mil
ducados más; y si no hobiere comparación
de lo de los españoles, servirán con dos
millones, pagados en cuatro años, con las
condiciones que ponen.
Petición a Felipe II a favor de los Indios
de Perú (1560)
Were the curacas, the native elites of Andean society, socios in venture
capital? If so, were they partners at the general or limited partner level? Were
they entrepreneurs? If there had been partnerships between the indigenous
and their invaders, does conquista then belong as much to the native peoples
of the Americas as it did to their invaders? And does this question itself
amount to an economy of belonging? As much as conquista may have been
about possession, among other things, is partnership in a venture synonymous
with ownership? Who held stakes in it? Is material benefit from a venture
enough to implicate a beneficiary in the wrongs performed by an enterprise?
While it is possible to hold stakes in a venture without having an effect on the
corporation’s culture or governing ethos, especially at the limited partnership
level, the guidelines used by the lascasian network of confessors held that
receipt of any usufruct, direct or indirect, from conquista, was a liability on the
conscience.
182
Who owns the conquista? Who is liable for it? Who participated in the
sociedad of empire and its negocios? Are all inhabitants of empire imperialists
by virtue of participation in the day-to-day life of transactions with capital?
Can one live and thrive within the dominion of venture capital without being
one of its “little hands”? Does bidding in the code of busy-ness, of venture
capital, mean that you are doing the bidding of empire? Where does agency
begin and liability end?
Perú in the 1560s offered a dynamic, constantly changing landscape of
institutions and alliances. Manco Inca’s insurgency in 1536 and later retreat to
Vilcabamba was followed by the wars among various Spanish factions as the
original partnership between Francisco Pizarro and his brothers with Diego
Almagro fell apart over who would control Cuzco, the center of the Inca
empire. In all these violent encounters, local indigenous elites (curacas) and
indios cast their lots in these conflicts that were rending at the seams the
original corporation behind the conquest of Perú. In this context, for the indios
of the encomiendas before the 1st Lima Council of 1551, there was little
Spanish influence felt in their daily lives except for those areas of intense
interaction—areas with preconquest accumulations of wealth in labor and
precious metals—such as Cuzco and Lima (Lockhart Spanish Peru). Despite
the desire of the encomenderos to live near the indios, who had been placed in
their care for spiritual tutelage in exchange for their labor, the only nonindigenous allowed to live among the indios were the doctrineros.
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It has been argued that the encomienda system in the Andes was
grafted onto the existing institutions of ayllu, minka and mita which native
elites, i.e. the curacas, had managed as tribute to the Inca hierarchy. Curacas
were prominent members of a large kin group (ayllu) that claimed a huaca as
a common ancestor; the huacas, the ancestors embodied in mummies (mallki)
and uncanny land and water formations, speak to their descendants, involving
themselves in the lives of those who venerate them. Curacas had always found
themselves in tension between the demands made on them by their kin and
the huacas, at the local level, and the requirements made of them at the supralocal level by pan-ethnic overlords such as the Incas.1 Minka was and is a
reciprocal labor exchange within the ayllu and it is given priority over labor
tribute to the state (mita). As numerous authors have contended, curacas had
access to the excedents of the ayllu, both in labor and in kind, through their
control of women and the practice of polygyny and goods produced by women
(such as corn beer and textiles).2 The conquistadores recognized the
importance of alliances with the curacas, but the encomiendas were not
distributed in accordance with the traditional boundaries of the prehispanic
ayllus. This discrepancy in the organization of kin, territory and labor created
1
For the Andean archaeological record, Lanning coined the term “horizons” to refer to
the eras of inter-ethnic political and cultural cohesion in the central Andes (i.e.,
Chavín, Huari, Tiahuanaco, Inca) and “periods” to refer to polities that remained
“local” in their forms of organization (ex. Paracas, Lima, Moche, Chimú).
2 See Gose, Murra, and Duviols. Though all authors agree on the prehispanic
importance of corn beer in Andean society, there are, however, discrepancies on the
subject of prolonged inebriation. For Gose, drunkenness and orgies emerged as a
degeneration of the traditional system, caused by the stresses of conquest and the
imposition of monogamy by the State and Church. For a millenarian view of ritual
drunkenness, see Duviols.
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upheaval in traditional power structures, upending not only the hierarchy
among greater and lesser curacas, but also the animated landscape of power
among the mummies and huacas that continued to speak to their kin but could
no longer perform the organization of ayllu, minka, and mita coherently.
The mismatch between institutions in the Andes, the desolation of the
indios, and the increasing campaigns to ‘extirpate idolatry’ led to the retreat of
the huacas from their traditional vessels. In the 1560s, followers of the taquiy
ongoy (the dancing and singing sickness) movement sought to revive the
huacas by providing themselves as places where the huacas could recover
their strength, enough to fight against the Christian God and saints and expel
the Spanish once and for all. The taquiongos demanded that the curacas
purify themselves in order to communicate with the huacas once more; these
demands, in turn, implied that the curacas had been ‘contaminated’ by their
contact with the Spanish and, thus, lost their ability to perform the will of the
huacas. As Stern has contended, the ambivalent attitude of the curacas toward
the demands of the taquiongos exemplified the conflicts of interest performed
by native Andean elites. However, the curacas’ bid for incorporation with the
Crown in 1560 displays a moment, if only for a couple of years, when the
interests of encomenderos and curacas did not align. However, both parties
would claim to represesent, truly, the interests of the Indians.
Were the minka and mita translated into a sociedad between
encomenderos and curacas? Was the Spanish sovereign just another overlord
in a series? One more “horizon,” in the pendular movement between local and
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interethnic polities in the Andes? If so, was it only a matter of time before
insurgency would reclaim the local imperative? What are the contradictions
posed by indigenous sociedad—both as partnership and society—in the
conquista?
The system of labor tribute in exchange for Christian tutelage, known as
the encomienda, relied on the prehispanic habitus of labor and kin relations
between the curacas and the ayllus, while upending their traditional
boundaries. The tribute of the indios not only provided material rewards to the
encomenderos and the royal coffers, but also paid for the salaries of the
doctrineros sent to live among them and teach Christian ways. The various
political visions that emerged in Perú during the decade of the 1560s all had to
address this foundational contradiction in the labor and spiritual exchange.
The alternative proposed by the curacas in their bid for incorporation to the
Spanish Crown deserves critical attention because they were widely seen, by all
parties, as the mediators of the spiritual and material economies of the
empire.3 Yet their mediation, between ayllu and empire, at the time of the
competitive bidding for perpetuity or incorporation, remains difficult to
define.
What does it mean to negotiate? In the book of edited articles on the
native peoples of New Spain and their negotiation “of the terms of their
3
As employed by Stern, “mediation” and “negotiation” in the Andean context are
similar to being stuck between a rock and a hard place, i.e. “the post-Incaic alliances
caught native elites between traditional roles as protectors of ayllu interests, and new
opportunities and demands as ‘friends’ of the conquistadores” (158).
186
submission,” Kellogg uses the phrase “negotiation within domination” to refer
to the participation of indigenous elites in the development of colonial
institutions. Yet this focus on indigenous elites could serve as another instance
of a system predicated on indirect rule, whereby the metropoli relies on
indigenous elites to organize domination of productive classes in the service of
capital. How, then, might we describe the alliances between encomenderos
and indigenous elites against the metropoli? As Ruiz Medrano has argued, the
last direct descendant of the Mexica ruling class, Don Luis de Santa María
Cipac, who was also the governor of México Tenochtitlán, allied himself with
the Spanish encomenderos, in a revolt against Philip II that would have led to
the establishment of a new monarchy with Martín Cortés, the second marqués
del Valle, at its head. The encomendero and Mexica revolt responded to
changes in law that redirected most tribute to the King, leaving little for local
elites.
Could the participation of Mexica nobles in the encomendero
insurgency in the city of Mexico (1564-66) be qualified as an instance of Indian
political consciousness, as contended by Ruiz Medrano?4 Was it an elite bid for
increased power in a new empire? Can indigenous elite and indio be used
synonymously, without taking Indian consent as a given? If so, what is the
nature of that consent? Is it the result of persuasion or coercion? The
synonymous use of indio for indigenous elite could prove problematic for our
4
In the Anales de Juan Bautista, cited by Ruiz Medrano, the revolt of the indios
against the Philip II’s new tribute could also be interpreted as a revolt against their
indigenous overlord, Santa María Cipac (69).
187
own understanding of the power dynamics in the Spanish empire. Should
indigenous elites be taken at their word when making claims as advocates for
Indian interests? Or is Indian interest yet another trope of legitimacy wielded
among combative elites?
As Ranajit Guha has argued both in Elementary Aspects of Peasant
Insurgency and Dominance without Hegemony, the colonial structures of
power needed the participation of indigenous elites in order to maintain
productivity. Perhaps the synonymous use of indio, curaca, and cacique ought
to be avoided in discussions of colonial power structures in Latin America
because the interplay between power, hegemony and the subaltern gets
confused in the redaction. This is especially true in imperial modes of conquest
that use the structure of venture capital, the trading companies, for their
incursions into foreign lands before founding colonial rule on native
institutions, as long as these can be coerced into the service of capital. Guha’s
analysis of colonial history and power thus assumes significant distinctions
among the indigenous in his privileging of the consciousness of the subaltern,
history from below. The question remains, did negotiation “counterbalance”
domination, as suggested by Owensby (xii)? Or is negotiation just another
form of domination? Were indigenous elites persuasive or coercive in their
power relations with the indios when negotiating on their behalf with the
Spanish Sovereign?
In their failed bids for incorporation and perpetuity, both the
encomenderos and curacas claimed to speak in the interest of the indios. Were
188
the indios, indeed, their socios in these bids for new political organizations of
tribute in labor and in kind? In the Andes, how did the general and limited
partners in the conquista confront the contradictions that came to the fore in
these divergent proposals for doing the empire’s bidding in 1560?
Is this negotiation within domination, as Kellogg has argued for similar
proceedings in New Spain? Is negotiation another aspect of domination?
While, as Kellogg has contended, “it is also true that the ability of the Crown to
assert authority—whether by Isabella in the Caribbean and early sixteenth
century New Spain or the Hapsburgs in later sixteenth-century New Spain and
Perú—lay in part in the willingness of the indigenous population to accept that
authority,” doing negocios with another, in the busy-ness of it, demarcates
liabilities, and envisions, as a function of mutual gain, a shared future (4).
Also, how is indigenous acceptance of the Crown’s authority construed? Was it
freely given? Coerced? The result of persuasive argumentation? As argued in
the second and third chapters, the forms of indigenous consent were under
continuous review. Moreover, the social contract(s) in the negocio of the
Indies, per Isabel’s letter to Ovando, explicitly make the colonial subject’s
liberty a function of productivity. The distribution of labor, its usufruct and its
times of productivity and rest supersede any other concerns, including
questions of justice. Indeed, the encomienda economy makes justice
contingent upon usufruct. This usufruct, in turn, depended on the indigenous
habitus, entirely at odds with the modus operandi of Christian empire.
189
This chapter examines the failed bids for perpetuity of the encomienda,
by the encomenderos, and the counter-offer for incorporation by the curacas
that ignored their erstwhile allies. Finally, the visions of a prominent
dominican, Fray Francisco de la Cruz (d.1578), are analyzed for their grand
attempt to reconcile all contradictions between the Spanish modus operandi
and Andean habitus in the service of a new Christian empire centered around
Lima as the new seat of temporal and spiritual power. His advocacy for
polygyny and the marriage of prelates within what he considered was a
coherent, and very Catholic worldview, ended with several trials by the
Inquistion in Lima. Notably, the trials did not stop following his death when he
was burnt at the stake as a heretic in 1578; years later, his inquisitors could not
decide if his attempts at reconcialition were a sign of madness (locura) or
heresy (herejía). In turn, the binary opposition of heresy and madness in Perú
in the late 16th century represents a clear break with Alfonso X’s
charcterization of heresy as a form of madness in the Siete Partidas (7.26).
Bankruptcy and Bidding
As mentioned in the third chapter, the crown’s bankruptcy of 1557 lent
new urgency to negotiations with the encomenderos and curacas of Perú.
Following the bankruptcy, Philip II made the first overture to the
encomenderos in the viceroyalty of Perú, offering perpetuity of the
encomienda, but also greater jurisdictional power to the encomenderos, in
190
exchange for gold and silver. The terms Philip II offered to the encomenderos
in 1559 surpassed the demands that Gonzalo Pizarro and his cohorts had made
in 1546.
As presented by Philip II, the transition to perpetuity would have given
the encomenderos limited sovereignty over native subjects but not over the
territory they inhabited. Spanish residents with encomienda (vecinos
encomendados) could leave their labor and land tributes to their inheritors,
reside with the Indians and have jurisdiction over them.5 The residency clause
was particularly important to the encomenderos and a cause of concern not
only for the clergy and the curacas, but also to Spanish residents without
encomienda (vecinos sin encomienda) such as merchants, and conquistadores
or their descendants, who already complained that the encomenderos had a
monopoly on indigenous labor. For their spiritual care, the encomenderos had
to pay a tenth of the tribute to the clergy responsible for evangelizing among
the Indians who gave them tribute. This had led to many encomenderos
having a hand in assigning the doctrineros to preach in their encomienda;
however, there were also many complaints leveled by doctrineros, who
claimed that they never received the tithes, against the encomenderos.
At the time of the negotiations for perpetuity or incorporation, less
than five hundred of the eight thousand Spanish male residents in Perú were
encomenderos; this handful of encomenderos received over a million pesos of
5
Note that this system never came to fruition. Also, the territories covered by
encomiendas were not necessarily contiguous, creating a patchwork of competing
encomiendas that were also at odds with the territorial delimitations of the ayllus.
191
tribute per year from over half a million indigenous men between the ages of
eighteen and fifty. Though indigenous women were not accounted for as direct
sources of labor, their bodies and the products of their labor provided the
excedent among the ayllus and were the foundation for the curacas’ power
and access to male labor for the encomienda. The other seven thousand five
hundred Spanish residents were sons of conquistadores or pacificadores who
had not received encomiendas but made claims to them. Then there were the
vagrants, the vagabundos and gente perdida, also known as the soldados, in
short, the armed guns, who wandered Perú as mercenaries looking to try their
luck in the next insurgency. They had weapons but they also begged for food
and shelter. Many Spanish pretendientes to encomiendas feared that allowing
the current encomenderos to purchase jurisdiction in perpetuity would cut
short the slim chances they might have had at receiving an encomienda in the
status quo.6
The encomenderos of Cuzco, La Plata, Lima, Trujillo, Chachapoyas and
Santiago de Moyobamba offered the King three and a half million pesos to be
paid in eight installments over eight years. This must have been quite a
disappointment for Philip II who had entertained and rejected another offer
6
For example, in 1563 Rodrigo Méndez and Pedro Avendaño rebelled in Cuzco in a
bid to receive an encomienda for themselves (Carta del Dr. Cuenca al Rey, 30 de
Abril de 1563, in Goldwert 213). In the same letter Cuenca also tells Philip II about a
group of scam artists, also in the Cuzco area, who had offered to represent the
interests of the curacas in exchange for four thousand pesos. Upon receipt of the four
thousand pesos, the scam artist and his accomplices left their clients stranded.
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for 7.6 million pesos from the encomenderos just six years earlier, when
Antonio de Ribera advocated on behalf of the encomendero community.
The arguments in favor of the encomienda in perpetuity in 1556 and
1561 did not emphasize remuneration for past actions. Three decades after the
bidding wars, Acosta would give a much franker assessment of the capital
investment and labor contributions (when violence is accounted for as labor)
of the conquistadores and the Crown’s ensuing debt (and, to his mind, lack of
relative power). Though for Acosta, the Sovereign’s power in an empire would
be proportional to the percentage of its original investment in ultramar
ventures, the encomenderos themselves had supplied a wider gamut of
arguments to justify their rebellions and claims to the perpetuity of the
encomiendas in the mid sixteenth century.7 Instead of speaking in terms of
accounting for past debts, they made future projections and employed the
metalepsis of venture capital or the confusion of causes for effects. Notably,
the encomenderos claimed that if they received their encomiendas in
perpetuity they would no longer have a cause to rebel against the Spanish
Crown.
7
Alonso de Villanueva and Gonzalo López were coy when comparing the material
contributions, made by the conquistadores vs. the Crown, to the conquest of New
Spain, noting the success of the conquista in Mexico “sin que Su Majestad hubiera
gastado nada del tesoro o patrimonio real” ‘even though Your Majesty spent none of
your treasure or royal patrimony’ in the enterprise. As representatives of the
encomenderos of Nueva España, they advocated a “recompensa perpetua” ‘perpetual
compensation.’ Villanueva and López argued, with graphic acumen, the system’s
unsustainability and its oppression of the Indians of New Spain. Without perpetuity,
the encomenderos, i.e., their clients, were “mercenarios y no agricultores,”
‘mercenaries, not cultivators’ who “sólo trataban de beber su sudor [de los indios]
para luego irse” ‘would drink the [Indians’] sweat only to leave’ (qtd. in Hackett 1.56).
193
The encomenderos contended that assignment of the encomiendas in
perpetuity, with added jurisdiction over the Indians, would be beneficial for all
stakeholders in the colonial enterprise. Greater certainty surrounding their
sons’ patrimony would allow the encomenderos to make capital investments
in bettering their charges’ living conditions and those of the lands that the
Indians worked. These greater investments in work and capital would lead to
more prosperity and, thus, greater tribute in the king’s coffers from growth in
commerce, agriculture and mining. An added benefit would be the guaranteed
loyalty of the encomenderos. Their loyalty would translate into real savings for
the king’s treasury since they would happily provide labor and funds for
“pacifying” any future rebellions; there would be no need for the King to pay
for a standing army in the Indies, because the loyalty of the encomenderos
would be secured in perpetuity. The irony of these assertions was not lost on
either party in the negotiations as the memory of Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion in
1544, and its material ravages, was still fresh.8 The cause of the encomiendas’
perpetuity continued to inspire violent vindications, especially among the
8
See Pedro Cieza de León’s La guerra de Quito and the Relación anónima de las
cosas acaescidas en las alteraciones del Perú for contemporary accounts of the
encomenderos’ insurrection, led by Gonzalo Pizarro. Gonzalo Pizarro’s pretensions
included naming himself king of Perú, marrying a coya, granting encomiendas with
jurisdiction in perpetuity and also drafting laws in protection of the Indians
(Lohmann Villena, Las ideas jurídico-políticas en la rebelión de Gonzalo Pizarro 4065). Bernal Díaz del Castillo has a colorful description of just how the rebels’ requests
for perpetuity were received by the members of the special junta summoned to decide
the matter of perpetuity ‘once and for all’ in Valladolid in 1550. Bartolomé de las
Casas, Pedro de Gasca, Vasco de Quiroga, and the Bishop of Michoacán, also
attended.
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vecinos residing in the richest agricultural and mining centers of Perú: Cuzco
and Potosí.
The renewed prosperity of the encomiendas granted in perpetuity
would also provide an incentive for encomenderos to pay the tithes from the
Indians’ tribute for their evangelization on time, implicitly conceding the truth
to charges of laxity in payments that had infuriated many a member of the
clergy. Their argument thus implied that the lack of perpetuity had created
uncertainty which had not permitted the encomenderos to look after their
encomendados properly. Interest, which as argued in chapter one, had been
vaunted as the price of peril, now made its own claims. Interest, personified,
made its own claims to ensure the security of its capital investments.
Uncertainty surrounding lease terms for indigenous labor generated, and
legitimated, the unrest of the encomenderos.9 Yet much of the unrest was
caused, of course, by the insurrections of encomenderos demanding the
perpetuity of the encomienda.
Antonio de Ribera chose to negotiate with deference to the metalepsis
of “love interest” whereby love for one’s brethren not only did not contradict
the interest one hoped to gain from one’s brothers in Christ, but reinforced
each other’s interests. As proposed to Philip II, the encomenderos’ love for the
Indians would multiply just as the population would multiply and the capital
9
The uncertainty argument recalled similar reasoning made by the Hieronymite
fathers sent to investigate the Indians’ living conditions. Their report released in 1518
recommended the perpetuity of the encomiendas as a reform effort to ameliorate the
Indians’ living conditions and was attacked by Las Casas as illogical and ignorant.
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investment in land and people would similarly bear fruit. The qualms about
unnatural metaphors, of money spawning money, were no longer the common
currency of moral values, at least not for the privileged membership of the
social and economic station in Peruvian colonial life, known as the
encomenderos. As a sign of their good faith the encomenderos accompanied
their arguments for the perpetuity of the encomienda, couched in “love
interest,” with their estimation of the value, in pesos, of the right to
jurisdiction and tribute over the Indians in perpetuity.
This view had been supported in part by the Franciscan Alonso de
Castro, who had presented a report in 1555 to Charles V and Prince Philip, at
their request, on the subject of whether the encomiendas could be sold in
perpetuity in good conscience. Castro had sided with the encomenderos of
Perú because of, not in spite of, their recent rebellion. For Castro, the Papal
Donation could not strip indigenous polities of their sovereignty but it
provided a “supra” sovereignty to bring knowledge of God, peace and justice
to the Indies. Had the encomenderos succeeded in their rebellion, Spain would
have lost its supra sovereignty in actu and Christianity would lose its
privileged place in the Indies: the unfaithful would not convert and the newly
converted could become apostates. To postpone the granting of the
encomiendas in perpetuity would only encourage more rebellions. Thus, in
another nod to the metalepsis of venture capital, Castro recommended
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conceding the encomiendas in perpetuity in good conscience.10 Not
surprisingly, following Castro’s recommendation and Antonio de Ribera’s
multi million peso offer, the Consejo de Indias and the Crown, which was
grappling with impending bankruptcy in 1556, sent commissioners to
negotiate with the encomenderos of Perú.11 However, the Consejo de Indias
also issued a detailed opinión that outlined all of the drawbacks of perpetuity
with jurisdiction, including de facto slavery in perpetuity for the Indians and
more rebellions among the vecinos no encomendados (Konetzke 340-357). 12
The Consejo contended that the King could not give away what he didn’t have,
i.e. ordinary and criminal jurisdiction over the Indies. In February 1558
Mercado de Peñaloza, oídor of the Audiencia de Lima, suggested granting
perpetuity without jurisdiction to the encomenderos of Perú. He felt that the
smaller encomenderos would be unable to afford the higher price for
jurisdiction and, also, granting jurisdiction to the encomenderos would place
the Indians at the their mercy with hardly any oversight from the Crown.
10
Suggesting that it would be even better, in good conscience, to bestow the
encomiendas in perpetuity rather than sell them, Castro nevertheless conceded that a
gift in perpetuity was highly unlikely. However, if the Crown were to make a sale it
should do so at a moderate price (Levillier 36).
11 The Consejo de Hacienda had already recommended the sale of the perpetuity of the
encomienda in 1552 (Carande Thobar II. 122-24). Soon after the commissioners left
for Perú, Charles I abdicated the throne of Spain on January 26, 1556.
12 A detailed analysis of Philip II’s counter proposal to the Consejo de Indias for
granting perpetuity and civil and criminal jurisdiction mero mixto imperi may be
found in Lohmann Villena (250) and Goldwert (353-355). As observed by Goldwert,
Philip II was willing to create an aristrocracy out of the encomienda but without
contiguous landholdings. Effectively, Philip II had been willing to offer Ribera more
power than he had requested before the Consejo de Indias intervened.
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As soon as the curacas learned of the commisioners’ impending visit to
Perú, they met in Lima in July and August in 1559 and named their advocates,
fray Domingo de Santo Tomás and Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, both of whom
were in Spain at the time.13 The curacas drew up the following proposal with
eight items:
1. After the living encomenderos died, their benefits would return
to the Crown and no more encomiendas would be distributed
thereafter.
2. No encomendero or member of his household could ever enter
an Indian settlement under any circumstances.
3. Indios in corregimiento, i.e. indios who paid labor tribute to the
Crown directly, would see their tribute reduced by half.
4. Each Indian would pay tribute according to his ability to work or
pay.
5. Settlements with reduced populations would be incorporated
into larger towns so as not to be burdened with high taxes, based
on a census of an earlier, larger population.
6. Issues of general interest to all Indians were to be discussed by a
General Assembly of representatives as during the times of the
Incas.
7. The curacas, or señores principales, were not be obligated to
work, and would receive their coat of arms, an empresa.
8. Indian lands would no longer be given to the Spaniards.
The terms sought to create an indigenous aristocracy (curacas or señores
principales), distinct from the indios both in livelihood and in self-fashioning.
Indians work; curacas do not work. Paradoxically, those who do the
negotiating would define themselves as ociosos and receive the empresa as a
sign of their class privilege. At the same time, the curacas advocated for a
13
Las Casas had promoted full incorporation of indios encomendados into the Crown
in a letter to Fray Bartolomé de Miranda in August 1556.
198
reduction in tribute, making it commensurate to the Indians’ ability to pay.
They made this demand on behalf of the Indians directly under their
jurisdiction and those rendering tribute to the Spanish Crown in
corregimientos. The fifth proposition, the consolidation of indigenous
settlements, seems to prefigure Viceroy Toledo’s policy of the reducciones that
centralized Indian populations. However, the demand to account for the losses
in population, and thereby reduce the amount of tribute, speaks to the
curacas’ traditional roles of protectors of the ayni, inter-ayllu reciprocity, and
the lives of their kin.
It is the sixth proposition—the convocation of the General Assembly—
that deserves our undivided attention. What could this possibly mean? How
were these assemblies organized during the time of the Incas? Also, could a
new political structure—as proposed by the curacas—enact a remedy for the
injuries of conquista? Though the Apologética historia had not been
published, members of the lascasian network shared the conviction of Las
Casas, made manifest in the Apologética, but also in De thesauris and the
Doce dudas, that the discovery of the Indies by Spain could not be qualified as
providential. However, the demand for reparations seems to be at odds with
the curacas’ bid for (limited) sovereignty following the terms of venture
capital.
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The Petition of 1560
In representation of the “caciques and señores naturales y sus pueblos
de las provincias de aquel reino que comúnmente se llaman el Perú” ‘curacas
and natural lords of the provinces of that kingdom commonly known as Perú,’
the curacas, and friars Bartolomé de las Casas and Domingo de Santo Tomás
in their stead made an offer to Philip II that must have been difficult to refuse:
En nombre de los indios del Perú, contra la perpetuidad: y
ofrecen servir con lo mismo que los españoles y cien mil ducados
más; y si no hobiere comparación de lo de los españoles, servirán
con dos millones, pagados en cuatro años, con las condiciones
que ponen. (Las Casas and Santo Tomás 465)
In name of the Indians of Perú, against perpetuity: and they offer
to meet and see the offer of the Spanish with one hundred
thousand more ducats; and if the Spanish do not make a
comparable offer, they will serve the Crown with two million
[ducats], paid over four years, under the following conditions.
From the first line of the text, the curacas challenge ‘the Spanish’
“los españoles” ‘in name of the Indians’ “en nombre de los indios” by
promising to outbid the Spanish no matter what their counter-offer might be.
Vowing to give 100,000 more ducados more than anything else the
encomenderos might have offered or would offer in the future, the curacas
would instigate a bidding war. The text eschews any pretensions to love
interest with the encomenderos. Instead, it accuses the Spanish, always los
españoles, never the encomenderos or vecinos, of negotiating in bad faith; and
it declares, without any caveats, that there can be no shared interest or love
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between the two parties. The defining characteristic of their relationship is one
of debt and liability, not love or friendship. The references to nationality, and
ommissions of the encomenderos’ title or occupation, reinforces the argument
that runs throughout the text: the other bidders don’t belong in Perú; they are
foreigners who have torn at the social fabric of our native societies in their
greed; they have rebelled against their King; they are not to be trusted as they
do not bid, or do the King’s bidding, in good faith. Yet the constant allusion to
their competitors—with whom they claim to have no shared interests—as
españoles begs the question: isn’t the King Spanish? The short answer,
according to the curacas, is no.
In their petition, the curacas allude to the longstanding Roman
distinction between citizen (cives) and foreigner (peregrinus) in order to
impute a foreign character to the Spanish in Perú. The curacas, whose
autocthony is a point of pride, argue in favor of an empire of Christian culture
much in the same way Cicero had asserted the existence of Roman citizenship
and urbanity beyond Rome in Pro Archia Poeta (62 BC), which had
anticipated universal Roman citizenship for all free residents within the
confines of the empire; citizenship along the lines of Cicero’s arguments would
be promulgated by Caracalla in 212 A.D. The Ciceronian interpretation of
Roman citizenship contradicted the earlier practice of ius gentium, which had
been applied to peregrini (foreigners) during the Republic. Ius gentium, as
applied to “foreigners” (i.e., those who were not Roman cives), had made
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contradictory proposals: first, all peoples had a right to govern themselves by
their own laws and customs; second, these laws had to follow universal and
natural laws; third, foreigners (in Rome) and natives (in conquered territories)
received equal treatment under ius gentium, which was different from the laws
governing citizens.
The curacas’ petition to Philip II draws upon the distinction between
cives and peregrini in order to transcend it. The Spanish have been so far away
from their King that they have become lawless; moreover, the full
incorporation of the curacas and their peoples into the Crown of Castile would
reinforce the precarious status of the españoles no encomendados. As seen in
the earlier section, the number of encomenderos vis à vis the nonencomendero Spanish population was but a small percentage of all Spanish
subjects living in Perú. The vecinos no encomendados had not lost hope that
they would one day receive the desired labor tribute in the form of the
encomienda. If the Crown incorporated the curacas, however, the descendants
of the encomenderos would find themselves like many Spanish men who did
not take up a trade but instead wandered, offering their skills at arms for sale.
Vecinos who lived as vagabundos; encomenderos who thought of themselves
as reyes; the uncertainty surrounding the perpetuity of the encomienda was
untenable, especially when Spanish subjects were acting like kings in a strange
land:
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[Con la incorporación] cesarán los bulliciosos y malos motivos y
orgullosas soberbias y ambiciones que los españoles, teniendo
indios, cada hora tienen y les nacen para rebeliones, porque cada
uno estima de sí poder ser rey, por la libertad grande que allá
han conseguido, por estar tan lejos de su rey. Y para asegurar
este peligro, va la vida que allá no haya español poderoso; y esto
saben bien los que cognoscen aquellas tierras y la presunción que
en ella cobran los españoles. (468)
[With incorporation] the rowdy and bad motives of the prideful
arrogance and ambitions of the Spanish, who have Indians,
which they show at all hours in their penchant for rebellions—
because every one of them thinks they could be King, because of
the great liberty that they have procured there, because they are
so far from their King—will cease. And to ensure against this
danger, there cannot be any powerful Spanish over there; and
this is well known to those who know those lands well [and see]
the pretensions of the Spanish.
The petition was presented in person by Las Casas and Santo Tomás in
Valladolid, though the text itself had been redacted in Perú. However, the
deictic markers (allá, su rey) point to Perú from the origo, or originating point
of Spain, and, thus, underscore the marginal status of “los españoles” who live
without the law of their King, ‘because of the great liberty they have procured
there’ “por la libertad grande que allá han conseguido,” and without the law of
the Church; to act in bad faith (malos motivos) and full of prideful arrogance
(orgullosas soberbias) was a mortal sin;14 to do so in a land where preachers
14
Origo refers to the speaker’s self-defined spatial relationship to her interlocutors in
the deictic markers of her utterance. As defined by Green, deixis refers to “the
encoding in an utterance of the spatio-temporal context and subjective experience of
the encoder. It is primarily linked with the speech or discourse event [that
foregrounds] the encoder’s subjectivity and various contextual factors […]
grammatically or lexically[…] Any utterance refers to the speaker’s ‘centre’ (origo)
and surrounding cognitive environment” (121-122). Personal and demonstrative
pronouns, certain adverbs, time-space references, vocative particles and subject
modifiers (adjectives and past participles which generally decline along gender,
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were denying encomenderos absolution was reckless. To speak for the curacas
from Spain about the ambitions of the Spanish in Perú was to accuse them of
impertinence, in literal and figural terms: they do not belong there; they
belong here, with their King, because they have demonstrated that they are
unable to behave properly in remote lands, far from their King. Granting
perpetuity to the encomenderos would make them kings in a foreign land, and
Philip II would be King in name only, and just barely, of the roads (no queda
más rey ni señor que de los caminos y aún esto le quitarán).
The curacas and their advocates recur to the epideictic tradition
(“pointing,” figuratively) of the orator in an apolitical setting: encomia,
invectives and literary portraiture all belong to the epideictic tradition as
elaborated by Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian (Rhetoric 1.9, On Oration 11.84,
and Orator´s Education 3.7). Properly speaking, these classic rhetoricians
proposed rhetorical strategies for oratory that were not pronounced in
legislative or judicial processes. As such, it is something of a mixed bag, but by
definition a trope used by a speaker intent on reifying, even further, the object
of his speech. Thus, Quintilian emphasized that signaling a figure in order to
emphasize its strong or weak points could be employed equally for men or
inanimate objects (such as a vase). However, in the classic epideictic tradition,
feminine marked) are deictic terms. However, verbs conjugated in the first person,
are also an obvious marker of the ‘zero-point’ while discourse organizers are more
obscure indicators. Green emphasizes that whether an utterance is deictic or not
depends on the speaker’s and interlocutor’s shared context. Thus, “deixis is
distinguished by use” (123). Also, deictic terms can either be indexical or symbolic.
The term deixis, in turn, references the epideictic tradition in encomia and invective.
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the orator “pointed out” the moral and ethical qualities or inferiorities that a
man could possess; his distance from the speaker was not, in itself, a sign of
vice or virtue. Moreover, indicating could only be done by an orator who was
invested with authority by his public. Las Casas and Santo Tomás, however,
invest the trope of deixis with a political argument for belonging. Their selfreferences emphasize their indigeneity to Spain; the curacas, in representing
the Indians, speak with the authority of autocthony from Perú. The Spanish in
Perú are neither here or there, with no sense of belonging and thus no rights to
pertinence and the tribute from the land and its peoples.
By alluding to “los españoles” as if they were the peregrini, which they
were, the curacas made a bid for Christian centrality in the Viceroyalty of
Perú. Contending that a Christian empire must have a leader who transcended
local identity not only functioned within the universal aspirations of the
requerimiento but also acknowledged the realpolitik of Spain under the rule of
German princes, the Hapsburgs, and their claims to the title of Holy Roman
Emperor. Charles V had only abdicated his reign as Holy Roman Emperor two
years earlier, and had passed on the rule of Spain and its colonies to his son
Philip in 1556. Thus, bankrupcy, succession and the fragmentation of the
territories held under Charles I came to a head within two years time. The
curacas’ insistence on treating Philip II as a Christian King and referring to
their rivals as Spanish, sustained the split in identity that Las Casas had
promoted so forcefully in the Brevíssima, published less than a decade earlier.
Paradoxically, the would-be partners in the negocio at hand, in the bidding
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taking place in Spain, but from Perú, were treating the Spanish King, who had
just lost the title of Holy Roman Emperor, as a Christian emperor by glossing
over the fact of the recent loss in title. The rhetorical (and pecuniary)
generosity of the curacas and their Dominican advocates would require a
reciprocal demonstration of good faith, but in kind, from their Christian king:
recognize us as your fellow Christians and loyal subjects who only possess
local aspirations to labor and tribute.
As seen in the earlier section, the encomenderos accused the curacas of
bluffing and, thus, negotiating in bad faith: where would they procure so much
gold and silver? The curacas give a hint at the source of their prosperity, what
would become the defining topic of Las Casas’ De thesauris:
Y porque en aquella tierra hay muchas sepulturas que tienen
grandes riquezas, y éstas no las quieren descubrir los caciques
porque no les tomen sus riquezas y tesoros los españoles, que
mande Su Majestad por edicto público que ningún español toque
en ella en descubriéndolas los indios, y de todo el oro y plata y
piedras preciosas quieren dar a Su Majestad la tercia parte, y que
a ellos les quedan las dos. (468)
And because in that land there are many burials with many
riches, which the curacas do not wish to locate (descubrir)[for
fear that] the Spanish will take their riches and treasures, [they
require] that His Majesty order, by public edict, that no Spaniard
touch [these burials] if these are located (en descubriéndolas) by
the Indians. [The curacas] wish to give His Majesty a third part
[of this treasure] and they would keep the other two parts.
The curacas make several claims in this short paragraph: secret knowledge of
hidden treasure in as-yet-to-be discovered burials; ownership of both the
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knowledge of their locations (intellectual property) and of the treasure itself
(physical property); and a bid to increase the king’s carried interest from the
customary fifth (la quinta) to a third (tercia). The curacas also acknowledge a
conflict of interest with the indios, who also share knowledge of these
locations, though the curacas insist that the Indians’ knowledge is not
proprietary; the knowledge of the indios, for the curacas, is illegitimate.
Fearing that the indios might share knowledge of these burials with the
Spanish, in effect, the curacas seek an edict from the King to preempt the
Indians from sharing intellectual property (location, i.e. inventio of treasure)
with other would-be-usurpers (los españoles). Does the curacas’ recognition of
possible conflicts of interest with the indios in the matter of buried treasure
undermine their advocacy (and thus, their petition) made ‘in name of the
Indians of Perú’?
The curacas define themselves as a mancomunidad, not as a sociedad,
and the distinction is an important one. Rather than associate for a shared
interest in material gains, the members of the mancomunidad exact reciprocal
obligations of one other around a specific goal. Often, mancomunidad is the
term preferred by translators into Spanish of the English “commonwealth.”
According to Autoridades (1724), mancomunidad is “la unión que dos o más
personas se obligan al cumplimiento o execución de una cosa. Latín.
Communitas. Communis obligatio, vel in solidum” ‘the union of two or more
people who commit themselves to the performance or execution of something.
Latin. Community. The common bond, or the whole (in solidum).’ The
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solidum, in this definition for mancomunidad, insinuates a synecdochic
relationship between obligation and community when solidum is understood
as “whole”; however, solidum can also mean gold coin, money (in its plural
form, solida) or salary. Are the terms of communal obligations set by bonds in
capital? Are communal obligations synonymous with money? Is community
synonymous with debt? The exact trope is difficult to define in the rendering of
mancomunidad in Latin by Autoridades. Yet by invoking mancomunidad in
their Petition to Philip II, and showing a willingness to receive less tribute
from the Indians, the curacas suggest a desire to define their community
without the strictures of capital even as they bid within its terms.
As opposed to the societas, which is structured around a partnership of
shared interests and inter-subjectivity (recall the etymology, inter esse), the
mancomunidad of the curacas defines itself as a community of persons
committed to one another’s welfare. Moreover, a mancomunidad of cities or of
towns need not share territorial cohesion, but it aspires to a community of
bodies. Though the petition is often referred to as an effort by the curacas of
the Mantaro Valley, in central Perú, because the majority of signatories were of
Huanca ethnicity, curacas from areas as disaparate as Cuzco and Chachapoyas
also participated in the joint effort. Thus, a mancomunidad of curacas, by
definition, displays an inter-ethnic level of organization that speaks with one
voice (prestan voz) but for a sole and finite purpose. But how do you procure
consent as an advocate for mancomunidad? Is an exchange implied, in the
lending of one’s voice to a common cause? Is it gratis, i.e. charitable?
208
If the curacas’ recourse to the term mancomunidad may be ambiguous,
it indicates, nevertheless, the political consciousness behind its invocation, as
the curacas outline their sixth condition to Philip II. Their sixth “condition”
for payment of at least two million ducats for full incorporation into the Crown
of Spain was a return to Prehispanic practices of self-rule based on principles
of consent and dissent:
Lo sexto, que cuando no hobieren de tratar los negocios
generales tocantes al estado de sus repúblicas, que se convoquen
procuradores de los pueblos y sus comunidades, para que lo
entiendan y consientan si fueren cosas útiles, o den razón de lo
contrario, como lo solían hacer en tiempo de sus reyes ingas, y se
acostumbra en las Cortes acá de España. (466)
The sixth, that when they are to discuss the general business of
the state of their commonwealths (repúblicas), that they
summon solicitors of the pueblos [towns, but also peoples] and
their communities, so that they may understand and consent if
they be useful things [i.e., the business at hand], or dissent, as
they used to do in the times of the Inca kings, and is the custom
in the Cortes here in Spain.
The allusion to the Cortes of España with the deictic acá generates an
ambiguity in the comparison of political and cultural institutions. In the here
(acá) can be heard the intervention of Santo Tomás and Las Casas in
Valladolid. Yet this here refers to the Cortes of Spain, not of Castille. In effect,
the comparison refers to a false similitude with a non-existent entity.
The fiction, Cortes of Spain, as a metaphor for the Andean Assembly,
thus blurs the degree of autonomy proposed by the sixth condition. The origin
of the parliamentary system, known as the Cortes, go back to the 13th century,
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and the power sharing systems of Castile, León and Galicia (xunta); the Cortes
represented the three estates (estados)—nobles, prelates and commoners—in
Leon and Castile, and had decision powers over taxation and the financing of
armies. Though Isabel and Ferdinand reduced the power of the Cortes of
Castile and Leon, making it a largely redudant body in the state apparatus
during the 16th century, other Cortes, such as those of Aragon (comprising
Catalonia and Valencia) or Navarre retained a significant level of autonomy.
Since there were no Cortes of Spain as a whole (i.e., in solidum), the allusion to
acá, in the phrase en las Cortes acá de España, begs the question, where in
Spain? Castile? Aragon? Navarre? The ambiguity allows for a spectrum of
autonomy in the curacas’ bid for incorporation with the Crown. In effect, it is
a political demand made in a bid for sovereignty in terms of capital (literally, a
bidding war) that couches its request in ambiguous, juridical terminology that
suggests a return to institutions, as in the past, in the Andes and perhaps in
Spain.15
Yet there is also a grammatical ambiguity in the sixth condition. Is the
no used in a negative enunciation or is it employed with an expletive value? If
the former, the no would limit summons of a general, pan Andean assembly to
15
The curacas’ gesture toward a comparable periodization in Spain in their bidding
for sovereignty in the Andes, offers yet another layer of complexity to the assertions
made by Kathleen Davis about historiography’s stakes in periodization during the
sixteenth century. The metaphoric use of a fictional institution, the Cortes of Spain, to
allude to the indigenous past (tiempo de sus reyes ingas) in a bidding war where
degrees of sovereignty were at stake, gives the reified past a specific value, i.e., it is
part of the “package” of conditions requested by the curacas in exchange for payment
in millions in ducats. Might Esposito’s thoughts on community and melancholy be
relevant to discussions of the curacas’ and the friars’ Transatlantic gesture?
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make decisions as a whole (entiendan y consientan, o dar razón de lo
contrario) over matters that would not affect the whole. Much more likely is
the use of no with an expletive value in sub-clauses that employ the
subjunctive mood (as in Latin). This is the only emphatic use of ‘no’ in the
seven conditions stipulated by the curacas as conditions for their bid. The
grammatical structure serves to underscore the importance of this final
condition both for the curacas, in continuation of practices under the Incas,
and their Domincan advocates. The “medieval” form of the Cortes, as an
assembly where at least three estates were represented, may have been
particularly appealing to Las Casas and his preference, as articulated by
Gustavo Gutiérrez, for the salt of the earth.
The curacas contrast their mancomunidad and their aspiration to hold
regular Cortes with the sociedad of the encomenderos, a social organization
motivitated purely out of self-interest. As alleged by the curacas, the
encomenderos had joined forces out of a shared interest (su proprio
particular interese); the offer of the españoles to buy the perpetuity of the
encomiendas was a bid to purchase the freedom of the curacas and of the
indios and make slaves of them (en cautiverio perpetuo). Yet their freedom
was unalienable, the curacas argued; it could not be bought and sold. The
encomenderos wished something unnatural, “to enslave peoples that are free”
“de pueblos y gentes libres que son, hacelles esclavos.”
In their petition, the curacas make their bid from without the
metalepsis of love interest. There is no love lost or shared interests that bind
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them to the Spanish, they argue; to the contrary, the Spanish are their
enemies, for these foreigners would make slaves of them, buying their freedom
for their own usufruct and toward the fulfillment of their wayward political
ambitions. Though the encomenderos had continued to make their bids within
the metalepsis of “love interest,” i.e. perpetuity would be a “win-win-win” for
all parties involved, the curacas declared that the encomenderos’ proposal on
the Indians’ behalf was nonsense, by definition, “because the Spanish are
always against what is good of the Indians, because [they follow] their own
interest” “porque los españoles son siempre del bien de los indios contrarios,
por su propio interese” (466). The reasoning of the curacas, when doing the
bidding of empire, recalls the distinction of Christian/ infidel in the conquistas
of Bishop Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela in North Africa. The
infidels’ losses are the Christians’ gains. In their petition to Philip II, the
curacas have no qualms in acknowledging that the Spanish Sovereign’s
acceptance of their terms would result in total losses for the encomenderos,
equivalent to the net gains of the native lords of Perú.
Nonetheless, the curacas sustain the metalepsis of “love interest” when
presenting their case for incorporation in terms of maximized benefits for the
Spanish Crown. Their counter-offer thus maintains, in part, the discourse of
“love interest” when the gains pertain to the Spanish Sovereign. Let us recall
that the encomenderos had presented a “win-win-win” scenario wherein the
encomenderos would treat the indios with greater dignity and love because
they would be able to do business in a climate of certainty, knowing that they
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were working toward the future of their heirs. Greater certainty for business
translated into better living conditions for the indigenous which, in turn,
would mean greater rewards for the Spanish monarch, who would receive
more tribute from a more productive work force. By contending that the Indios
would flourish better under their rule, the curacas aligned themselves with the
Spanish King as fellow Christians who shared the same interests; they, and not
the encomenderos, were the better custodians of the Indians’ biopower.
The curacas’ pretensions heighten the conflicts between the partners of
the imperial enterprise, allying with some while glossing over others. Speaking
of the españoles no-encomendados, they noted that granting perpetuity of the
encomiendas to the current encomenderos would give this already problematic
population—the majority of españoles in Perú—even more cause for despair,
as they would lose all hope of winning a fortune with an encomienda; peace in
Perú seemed to dangle on the thread of Spanish hopes for Fortune to smile on
their desires for indigenous tribute. Yet the curacas offered no answers to the
obvious riposte to their argument: how would incorporation of the curacas to
the Spanish Crown benefit the interests of this group of españoles without
encomiendas? Their glaring omission of a competing group’s interest increases
the friction between caritas and cupiditas that had always existed between the
juxtaposed, and later synthesized, terms; what had become the metaleptic
habitus of venture capital, the synonymous use of love and interest, began
splitting at the seams. The demands for a return to an earlier, prehispanic
form of the political, the proposal of an alternative form of self-government,
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indicate a weakness in the persuasive force of venture capital; it infused the
novel habitus of venture capital with a contrast to past practices. Though the
terms of the petition were spelled out in the terms of capital, the authors
reminded their Christian sovereign, it was not always thus.
The rhetoric employed by the curacas is also a small mercy for the fama
of Philip II. Framed as a “petition,” but structured as a bid for sovereignty in
exchange for demands, the text, in other words, could have offered a king’s
ransom. After all, Philip II had a great need for gold, to recall the words
employed by Hernán Cortés in his Segunda carta de relación, when
addressing Charles I, the new king’s father. The fear of mala fama, of once
again losing his credit, had forced the newly anointed King, Philip II, to make
the first offer, putting the sovereignty of Perú on the proverbial negotiating
table. The synonymous use of petition for bid, and, at certain points in the text,
for remedies and reparations treads ever so softly around Philip II’s needs and
the curacas’ demands. How could the call for reparations, ever
incommensurate to the losses suffered by the Indians, become another
bargaining chip in negotiations with the Sovereign, Christian or no?
Is bidding for sovereignty just another way of doing the bidding of
empire? Can there be negotiation without domination? As argued by Baber,
the caciques of Tlaxcala, who negotiated with the Spanish Crown for city
status, which held the promise of greater independence in the tradition of the
fueros, were ultimately successful. But how is this success “qualified”? Is
214
negotiation, when the enterprise of conquista was built around negocios, just
another aspect of domination? Should we speak, instead, of the “tragedy of
success”?16 Though the curacas spoke in the code of shared interests with the
Spanish King, they do not gloss over the language of reparations for losses and
injuries. The curacas make one cursory concession to the logic of “love
interest” in their offer to Philip II.
Much like the taquiy ongoy (singing or dancing sickness) movement
that would take hold of Southern Perú during the same decade as the
perpetuity negotiations with Philip II, the curacas had proposed a political
vision for the Andes with a minimal presence of their invaders. However,
unlike the taquiongos, the curacas made a distinction between friars, prelates,
and encomenderos; their negotiation with Philip II could hardly be called an
insurgency. The figure of Francisco Tenamaztle, exiled insurgent from the area
known as Nueva Galicia, points to the discontinuity between insurgency and
negotiation. As Rabasa contends, the once naked Tenamaztle, the nomad in
the desert, now an exile in Valladolid, must clothe his case for reparations in
the discourse of jus gentium and natural law as a Christian, with Las Casas as
his advocate; his insurgency, much like his former nudity, does not belong in
the annals of history (Without History 178-94). Las Casas argued his case
before Philip II in the same year that the Crown’s hacienda declared
bankruptcy, in 1556. Four years later, bidding for a measure of sovereignty
16
Stern speaks of the “tragedy of success” with reference to the Andean indios and
indias who managed to thrive in the new colonial economy and make the jump from
the república de indios to the república de españoles.
215
would be grafted onto the language of reparations in a petition sent from the
curacas of Perú.
The curacas show more complicity with the terms of negocios, much
like Ruiz Medrano’s Mexica or Baber’s Tlaxcalans. Yet the terms employed by
the curacas to settle the matter of the encomiendas, once and for all, are
rather unsettling. We hear the voice of Las Casas in the curacas’ calls for
reparations, but cannot reconcile these calls with the despair of Las Casas in
the Doce Dudas: the desolation is irreparable, no remedy is commensurate to
the loss. At the same time, the demand for reparations contradicts the gesture
of negotiating the terms, in ducats of gold and silver, of the limited sovereignty
of indigenous states under Christian Empire.
Is bidding for a social contract within empire equivalent to doing the
empire’s bidding? The curacas show indices of picking and choosing the
elements of empire that they were prepared to accept: the empresa, a coat of
arms, and salary of landed nobles in the Castilian tradition; increasing the
king’s share of buried treasure and mined ore; reducing indian populations
into dense settlements, a policy later pursued by Viceroy Toledo in the 1570s;
what had been and remained unacceptable for the curacas was the
cohabitation between Indians and españoles. Could it be that the curacas were
invested in a parallel system of government that would later become the
república de indios and república de españoles? If so, their bid for a república
de indios with themselves as the sole mediators between native labor and the
King was rejected.
216
How can we approach this failed bid with the respect it deserves? Listen
to the bid in the integrity of its moment, without recourse to the narrative arc
of historic development? Were the curacas doing the bidding of empire
(obeying it) or just making a bid for indirect rule within the imperial
framework? Theirs was clearly not a peasant insurgency, but their attitude
toward the encomenderos, at least in this moment in time, veers far from their
characterization, by Stern and others, as the middlemen between the república
de indios and the república de españoles. In the decade of the 1560s,
prominent native elites were attempting to bid out of this parallel system of
government in the colonies. Can we speak of negotiation as a “counterbalance”
to domination, as suggested by Owensby? The more urgent question remains:
can negotiation exist without domination, when its activity—busy-ness, negotium—belongs to the time and activity of capital? And yet there remains the
nagging feeling that this question responds to the a priori of capitalism’s
categories. What remains beyond dispute, however, is that the curacas had
waged a bidding war against the encomenderos in terms of absolute hostility.
Is insurgency the only way out of empire? Can we speak of a bidding
“insurgency” as opposed to a “bidding war”?
If Philip II had accepted either offer, perpetuity or incorporation would
not have taken effect until after the expiry of the two lives limit on the
encomiendas as it stood then. It is worth noting that the encomenderos had
chosen to bypass those who, indeed, possessed local jurisdiciton over the
Indians by virtue of jus gentium, i.e., the indigenous elites or curacas, even
217
after the Consejo de Indias and the King, eventually, admitted that jurisdiction
over the Indians was not theirs to give.17 Why was that? Why not negotiate
directly with the curacas? Both the encomenderos and, later, the curacas
engaged in bilateral offers and counter offers with the Crown, but did not
negotiate among themselves in Perú. If the encomenderos had wanted civil
and criminal jurisdiction over the Indians, why didn’t they make two offers,
one, to purchase the jurisdiction from the curacas and two, to purchase
perpetuity of the encomienda (rights to labor) from the Crown? It may be rash
to venture an opinion based, in part, on a lack of evidence, but the lack of
overtures between the encomenderos and the curacas were an implicit
confession, despite the rhetoric of a “win-win-win” proposal by the
encomenderos, that their differences were irreconcilable; they could not
negotiate with each other, that is, do negocios, let alone engage in dialogue;
that jus gentium was unalienable; the ties among peoples and land could not
be bought and sold. So, within one territory, two groups of elites ignored each
other and negotiated with the Sovereign on another continent.
In other words, the curacas’ rejection of the encomenderos as a party to
negotiations also rejects the advances of the conquistador as the middleman,
or matchmaker, of a loving empire. Unlike the Incas or the Mexica whose
creation myths follow the emergence of the first ancestors from distant caves
to the foundational moment of an urban center, of the polity that would have
authority over different peoples, the curacas had always emphasized their ties
17
Charles V passed the (in)famous “Derecho de suceder por dos vidas” in 1536.
218
to the local huacas. As direct descendants of the local, foundational ancestors
they are the truly autocthonous, since their identity and power are tied to the
local cthonic power.18 In initial contacts with their Spanish invaders, some
peoples in Mexico and Perú cast their lots in favor of greater local autonomy.
Like the Tlaxcalans who had allied themselves with Cortés, and later
demanded recognition and greater autonomy from the Crown for lending their
support to the European invaders, the Huancas in the Mantaro Valley and
other Andean peoples under the yoke of Inca rule in the territory comprised by
the Tahuantinsuyu similarly allied themselves with the Spanish to defeat the
Incas.
Were these alliances motivated purely by strategy or self interest? As
Gose has argued, much like the identification of Cortés with Quetzalcoatl, or
the native Hawaiians’ identification of Captain Cook with Lono in the 18th
century, the indigenous of Perú positioned the European invaders within their
own origin stories.19 This native positioning of the outsider as insider not only
18
See Shell’s Children of the Earth. See also Marcel Detienne’s Comment être
autocthone for a nuanced discussion of the political negotiations involved in the
construction of autocthony, from classical Athens to the Third Republic in France. As
employed by Viceroy Toledo during the 1570s, the narrative of the original journey of
the Incas from Pacaritambo to Cuzco would be used as evidence of their nonindigeneity and, thus, illegitimacy.
19 Sahlins’ Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981) emphasized
indigenous forms of rationalizing contact with the Europeans on their own narrative
terms. Thus, the identification of Captain Cook with Lono on his first trip to the
Hawaiian islands, and his killing on the second trip followed the structure of native
mythology. In response, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook by Obeyesekere turned
Sahlins’ thesis on its head, by arguing that the narrative of natives receiving
Europeans as Gods was a form of European mythology. Similar tensions have
animated the scholarly debates surrounding the identification of Cortés with
Quetzalcoatl and Pizarro et al. with Viracochas. Davíd Carrasco, Miguel León Portilla,
219
served to make sense of the upheaval in the Andean experience of the world
following the death of Huayna Capac and the events that followed, but also
contested emergent Eurocentricism by articulating a “politics of connection,”
which according to Gose, engaged in a “deliberate, counteracting response to
racism,” a trope that is chraracteristic of indigenous accounts of colonialism
worldwide (20).20 The Andean trope of the conquistadors as viracochas would
have served an “inter-ethnic collaboration” that led to a system of indirect rule.
In this scenario, curaca-led insurrection against the Inca state in alliance with
the Spanish invaders would eventually generate the system of Spanish
colonialism but, initially, until the crisis of the 1560s, it resembled greater
provincial sovereignty.
Why did the curacas abandon their erstwhile partners in insurrection
against the Incas? No triangle of negotiation has come to light; negotiations
were done in parallelism, despite the rhetoric of the “win-win-win” by the
proponents of the perpetuity of the encomienda. Yet the discourse
and Jacques Lafaye, to mention but a few, accept the identification of Cortés with
Quetzalcoatl in native narratives of conquista. Townsend’s Burying the White Gods
revises the identification in an attempt to rectify what she views as a “dehumanizing
narrative” meant to satisfy European historians’ needs to provide a satisfactory
justification for the relatively small number of Spanish who “conquered” the Mexica
and the Inca. Similarly, Adorno’s treatment of Mala Cosa in the Naufragios by Cabeza
de Vaca as a vision that responded to medieval Spanish narratives, would be
contested by Rabasa in Writing Violence with reference to chamanic practices in
beliefs by the indigenous of the Native American Southwest. See also Rabasa’s Tell Me
the Story of How I Conquered You. The repeated gestures of scholars such as
Obeyesekere and Townsend to explain away indigenous myths as the product of a
European prerogative for self-apotheosis threatens to undermine the power of myth
to organize past and present events meaningfully in terms other than the rationalism
of secularizing imperatives.
20 As discussed in the Introduction, my use of the term “event” follows that of Badiou
in Being and Event.
220
accompanying these parallel tracks of negotiations, between King and
encomenderos, between King and curacas, followed the rhetoric of “love
interest,” the synonymous use of caritas and cupiditas; this was especially true
in the texts composed by the encomenderos. Perhaps these parallel
negotiations serve to prefigure the Spanish juridical arrangement known as
the república de españoles and the república de indios.21 However,
pinpointing an origin for a juridical structure, in this case, the parallel
repúblicas, does not mean that our analysis of the same ought to replicate its
discursive parameters. By the same token, the widespread use of “negotiate”
as a catchall phrase for actions and practices of indigenous and other
marginalized peoples ignores the actual practice of negotiating, the busy-ness
of it.22 Negotiating with identity is most certainly relevant to the experience of
conquest; recall the negocio of indigenous identity in Isabel of Castile’s
instructions to Ovando, discussed in the third chapter. To negotiate, first and
foremost, is to engage in a practice that negates an improductive use of time.
The “invaders as ancestors” trope insists on an indigenous framework
for appropriation of the imperial modus operandi and agency in the
generation of colonialism in the Andes. It is also an argument that depends, to
a certain extent, on the longue durée of politics, belief and religion in the
21
For a summary of colonial studies’ rejection of the analytical utility of the Spanish
administrative arrangement of two republics for a meaningful examination of colonial
culture, see Rappaport and Cummins (28-31).
22 Although Gruzinski invites his readers to visualize cultural contestation not as an
opposition of polar opposites, but as a “series of modulations,” this perspective may
not prove meaningful for analyzing discrete moments of cultural confrontation (213).
As noted by Gruzinski, but also his proponents, such as Rappaport and Cummins, this
approach aims at an understanding of cultural contestation over the longue durée.
221
Andes. By the time the curacas were petitioning Philip II for incorporation,
however, this identification of invaders as ancestors seems to have been
expendable to the extent that the curacas were requesting a renewed system of
indirect rule without the involvement of the conquistadors turned
encomenderos. While it is true that the Petición was mediated by Domingo de
Santo Tomás and Bartolomé de las Casas, it is difficult to imagine the latter
supressing such an important part of the native lords’ belief if the curacas had
indeed taken it into consideration.
Yet the curacas’ alliances with Christian leaders did not immunize them
from existential threats to their sources of power. The regulation of indigenous
marriage according to Christian precepts increasingly undermined a crucial
aspect of self-rule until, by the late 16th century, the festive consumption of
corn beer (qura) and the women, married or not, who produced it became
associated with sexual excesses, transgressions of Christian precepts on
which, paradoxically, the “native” system of labor, and thus the colony,
depended (Gose 140).The curacas’ bid for incorporation is no less interesting
because they continued to enjoy a pivotal role in the exchange of labor for
spiritual tutelage, despite their failed bid for self-rule in the bidding wars of
the 1560s. At the same time, their adherence to Christianity through indirect
rule acquiesced to an important limitation on the curacas’ power to control the
minka through women’s labor and marriage. The minka, as opposed to the
state enforced mita, functioned on reciprocal exchanges among ayllus, or
kinship groups with a common ancestor; the curaca accessed an excess of
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labor in these horizontal exchanges by offering an excedent of food and drink,
products of women’s labor. The issue of polygyny, thus, accounted for the
power of the curacas to control access to labor by the state, whether Inca or
Spanish. Yet polygyny was illegitimate under Christian doctrine, especially
after the Council of Trent reinforced the treatment of marriage (one man and
one woman) as a sacrament. How, then, to resolve the contradiction between
Christian tutelage and its material dependancy on pagan practice? Moreover,
when practiced among baptized Indians and curacas, polygyny was a sign of
apostasy.
The economic and moral values of the system contradicted one another,
but Christian hegemony depended on a contrary system of moral and
economic values. How could the fruits of indigenous labor in a domestic and
political economy, which was dominated by polygyny, pay for the salaries of
the Christian doctrineros? Could the doctrineros simply turn a blind eye to the
material contigency of their evangelizing enterprise? Or could Christianity
embrace the indigenous practices that seemed to turn their backs on Christian
doctrine? Part of the answer to these questions was provided by the heresy
trial of the Dominican friar Francisco de la Cruz, with repercussions for the
lascasian movement after the transitional decade of the 1560s. Fray Francisco
de la Cruz’s testimony bore witness to the complicity among members of all
sectors of colonial society, including the curacas (Abril Castelló, Francisco de
la Cruz, Inquisición, Actas I 195). But Cruz’s delirium also responds to the
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structure of venture capital’s “love interest” and its contingency on the Andean
habitus.
Other Proposals: The heresy of fray Francisco de la Cruz
Friar Francisco de la Cruz’s trial by the Inquisition in Lima, in which
José de Acosta participated, gave voice to the fears of what an Assembly or
Cortes of various indigenous estates could have enacted if their bid with Philip
II had succeeded.23 Francisco de la Cruz was a Dominican friar who arrived on
the same ship that brought fray Domingo de Santo Tomás to Perú at a time
when, as contended by Marcel Bataillon, Perú suffered from rapid criollization
(323). Yet the criollization process began almost as soon as Hernando Pizarro
returned to Perú from his trip to Spain to deliver the massive quinta to Charles
I. Armed with a cédula from Charles I, which promised encomiendas granted
in perpetuity, and a series of cédulas, from 1534-36, that gave Francisco
Pizarro the power to name his successor to the governorship of Perú, the
encomenderos cannot be faulted for believing that they belonged in Perú
(Lohmann Villena, Las ideas jurídico-políticas en la rebelión de Gonzalo
Pizarro 49-50).24 The promise of legal ties to indigenous labor in perpetuity,
23
Acosta dedicates an entire chapter to Fray Francisco de la Cruz’s heresy in his book
De Temporibus Novissimis, to illustrate the arrogance of the Antichrist (Bataillon
313).
24 Following the vague language of the earliest cédula, whose numerous loopholes
may have been conditioned by Charles I’s enthusiasm for the grand scale and speed of
returns in the Peruvian enterprise, more precise language specifying the limits of
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combined with marriages and mancebazgo (concubinage) between
conquistadors and Inca noblewomen had contributed to a burgeoning sense of
authocthony among the conquistadors.
The prophecies and ambitions of Francisco de la Cruz offer a monstrous
refraction of the conquista, its insurrections and its doubts: the requerimiento
had asserted that the Pontiff could move his seat of power anywhere in the
world; Francisco de la Cruz prophesied that Lima would be the new seat of
Catholicism and his son by Doña Leonor de Valenzuela, Gabrielico, would
reign as new Pontiff with his father, de la Cruz, ruling at his side as temporal
sovereign. The union of temporal and spiritual powers represented in the
chivalric fiction of Fernández de Oviedo’s Claribalte, discussed at length in the
first chapter, errs and is recentered in this other New World fiction, also the
center for the end of times.
Just as Acosta would apply a cost-benefit analysis to martyrdom in the
Indies twenty years after the escrutinio of Francisco de la Cruz, the dominican
heretic would propose a similar reasoning to massacre during his trial for
heresy. For Cruz, it would be better ‘that more than a few Spaniards go on
conquistas, because when the indios see few Spaniards, they are reckless in
their attacks and resist them even more, which gives way to the butchery
Francisco Pizarro’s authority to name a provisional governor, until Charles I could
name a permanent replacement, was not immediately forthcoming. By 1537, however,
it was apparent that Francisco Pizarro had made caso omiso of the subsequent royal
cédulas because he transferred the governorship of Perú to Gonzalo Pizarro
Yupangui, his son, and, in 1539, named his brother, Gonzalo Pizarro, as temporary
governor until his son, Gonzalo Pizarro Yupangui, would come of age.
225
(carnicería) of the Indians’ “que no vayan a la conquista pocos españoles,
porque los indios, viendo a pocos españoles, se atreven a acometerles y a
resistirles más, y es ocasión que se haga mucha carnicería en los indios” (Abril
Castelló and Stoffels 621). Cruz perceives that a larger group of armed men
will have a dissuasive power over the Indians. Thus, coerced consent would be
worth the extra expense and save more lives. Though Cruz aims to convince
his audience that the End of Days is approaching, he does not stray far from
the economics of conquista. For suggesting that the Church had its own Casa
de la Contración, Francisco de la Cruz turns on himself, denying his voice as he
utters his condemnation, charging God with the task of damning God’s
Church:
Y así ahora, aunque conoce que está obligado a decir las cosas
que ha dicho del Papa y de la Iglesia, y tuviera por pecado mortal
dejarlas de decir, pues que se lo ha dicho Dios para que se
enmienden, por otra parte las dice con vergüenza, hablando
como hijo que es de la Iglesia Romana, y viendo que habla contra
sus padres y cabezas. Y por esto dijo no quiero decir que lo digo
yo. Y que siente que es así por lo que Dios le ha declarado: Que la
Iglesia Romana, adonde está el sumo poder espiritual, trata las
cosas del gobierno espiritual como por vía de contratación.
(829-30)
And so it is now, though he recognizes that he is obligated to say
[repeat] the things that he had said against the Pontiff and the
Church, for silencing them would be a mortal sin, for God has
told him these things so that [the Pontiff and Church] be
reformed, he says these things in shame, speaking as a son of the
Roman Church, speaking against his fathers and leaders. And for
this reason he said, “I do not wish to say that I say this.” And he
feels this way because God has declared to him: the Roman
Church, where the great spiritual power resides, treats the
matters of spiritual government like a negotiation for contracts.
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The speech of reform is motivated by shame, by a self-proclaimed son
speaking against his fathers. Ashamed by what God impels him to declare, he
fears the mortal sin of remaining silent. The Church, he confesses, trata
(treats, but also trades) the things of spiritual government as if by contract, as
if it were another Casa de la Contratación. He dares to speak like a Lutheran,
he continues, so as to preempt Lutheran speech against the Church. His heresy
would preempt heresy. Following his death at the stake, the Inquisition retried
his case to verify if he was indeed hereje o loco. The binary proposition (hereje
o loco) raises questions reminiscent of the conundrum posed by Aquinas of the
child in the cave: is a rational rejection of the Catholic faith even possible? Is
radical reform of the Faith a proposition for the mad?
The prophesies of Francisco de la Cruz manifest the imperial impulse
toward synthesis, a vast monster that would consume all sources without
prejudice in an effort to reconcile all contradictions by any means. The strain
of the enterprise creates a discourse full of fissures. In the pretensions of Cruz
for his native-born son, Gabrielico, can be heard the echoes of the pretensions
of Gonzalo Pizarro, and the chauvinism of Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés.
Francisco de la Cruz, heretic, accuses the indigenous of apostasy; they are the
descendants of the lost tribes of Israel who turned against God and chose to
worship the devil. As apostates, they may be conquered; an argument that
hews to the logic of Vitoria’s legal titles of war, while straying from the
position, more generally accepted, that the indigenous had no prior explicit
knowledge of the mosaic covenant or the law of grace before the arrival of the
227
Spanish. However, his advocacy for polygyny and practice of adultery not only
made him a heretic and a sinner, but also an apostate, though one subsumed
by the practices he enjoyed and observed among his parishes in Southern Perú
and Lima. This turning away from his native Spain and orthodoxy resounds in
the preponderance of apostophe in his testimony on the prophecies of the
angel that spoke to María Pizarro.
Turning away from God, betrayal, adultery, these are all tropes for
apostasy in the Old Testament (2 Jeremiah 1: 3; 6 Ezechiel 9: 16). The forced
reconciliations of love interest became distorted, doubly confounded; Cruz’s
insistence on aligning trope and prophesy create an ‘uncanny’ coherence to his
message.25 It is almost as if one can recognize his heresy solely on the tropes of
apostasy that he impugns against the native peoples of Perú. From Cruz’s delirium, the deviation from the furrows of cultivated soil, what is also known as
the area without the nomos, i.e. the law, he accuses others of stepping out of
bounds but he is incapable of imagining the expulsion of Christianity from
Perú. Even so, Cruz is the first to admit that he knows not whether the angel
that speaks to him through María Pizarro is good or evil; it matters not, he
must obey.
Beyond the injunctions to practice polygamy or the twisted reasoning
behind his recommendations for armed campaigns against the indigenous, it is
this uncertainty about the origin and value of the oracular voices that
25
“Uncanny” as explored by Freud for heimlich, which, unlike ocio and negocio,
shares the same meaning with its negation, unheimlich.
228
Francisco de la Cruz turned to, that so confounded his inquisitors. Francisco
de la Cruz’s tenacity was the object of begrudging admiration from his
inquisitors, including Acosta. His belief that these things had to be done
belonged in an amoral system whose imperatives he nonetheless felt
compelled to obey.
How could Cruz have obeyed those voices if he was uncertain about the
moral provenance of these orders, good or evil? If it had not been so viscerally
performed, Cruz’s delirium almost seemed a parody of probabilism’s moral
theology. Though he questioned the sanctity of his source, Cruz nonetheless
offered his wisdom to the theologians who would be meeting at the upcoming
Tercer Concilio limense, so that everyone would understand how ‘this
business belongs to God’ “estos negocios son de Dios” (890). At the same time,
Cruz’s unquestioning obeisance to the voices’ imperatives reflected a
monumental shift in consciousness to the widespread delirium, in its
etymological sense, (en)forced by venture capitalism on a universal scale but
experienced in the daily transgressions of Spanish and Andean systems of
value. If we were to replace “market” for “angel,” in the prophesies given by
Cruz’s testimonies, we find something eerily close to modernity’s subscription
to free market capitalism.
In a Manner of Conclusion
In January 1562, in the town of Mañaques on the outskirts of Lima, the
curacas chose their own legal representation to make a counter offer to Philip
229
II. In addition to Domingo de Santo Tomás, who had just returned to Perú
from Spain, where he had recently published his Vocabulario and Gramática
of Quechua, Gerónimo de Loaysa, the Archbishop of Lima, and Fray Francisco
de Morales, a Franciscan. Bartolomé de las Casas was named as a replacement,
along with Fray Pedro de Cepeda, the Prior of the Augustine monastery in
Cuzco, among others.
Licenciado Polo de Ondegardo and fray Domingo de Santo Tomás
traveled together from Lima to La Plata to argue their respective cases, for
perpetuity of the encomienda and incorporation of the curacas, respectively.
Both solicitors would later claim, in their correspondence with Philip II and
the Council of the Indies, that the indios overwhelmingly supported the offers
for incorporation, or perpetuity, of their respective clients. Though the support
of Las Casas for the curacas’ offers lends support to the claim made by these
native elites to be the true advocates for the indios of Perú, even their petition
concedes, in part, that they could not ensure the consent of all Indians to their
enterprise, at least not without the coercive power of Philip II in the matter of
the huacas and the ongoing conquistas for their treasures.
There is a powerful figure for the remnant in Andean society, for those
who reject the metalepsis of venture capital in taking possession of their lives,
but nonetheless feel its claims on their life force: a visceral fear of the Spanish
viracochas and their exploitation of the Indians’ bodies, alive or dead. For
Gose, the fear of the naqaq in the 1560s were a sign of the rupture that Andean
peoples felt in their relationship, mediated through sacrifice, between
230
themselves and their deities (107). To this day, Andean collective memory
recalls the horror of conquistadors rendering Indian fat for skin salve. Known
as the naqaq or pishtacos, the pishtacos appear during periods of chaos to kill
native peoples for a commodity that fetches a high price in international
markets (Manrique; Theidon); these vampire-like creatures kill to make their
product of human grease, but never sell it locally. The pishtacos have found
different uses for human fat over the centuries: candlemaking and smelting for
Church bells; greasing railroad locomotives; lubricating jet gears during the
Space Race; or condimenting dishes in Lima’s fine dining scene.
In the 1560s, Cristóbal Molina dismissed these fears as nonsense. For
Molina, the fears that their bodies might provide grease for the tools in the
Church’s daily functioning (candles and bells), were but fictions proferred by
the Indians of Huamanga to disguise their true desires: to continue practicing
idolatry. Yet one of Molina’s contemporaries, a vecino of the empire residing
further north, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, may shed some light on the trope’s
material origins; writing his Historia verdadera de la conquista de México,
Bernal Díaz repeatedly alludes to the practice of rendering Indians’ fat (el unto
del indio) for the purposes of curing the wounds of conquistadors (233).
Over the longue durée of Andean experiences with violence for
corporate profits, there has been no consensus on the existence of the naqaq,
but, perhaps, the naqaq is a trope, embodied by the very bodies for whom the
horror felt at the (ab)uses of human flesh, traded as a commodity on world
markets, has become second nature. An unnatural creature, much like capital
231
breeding capital in the Scholastic trope for usury, the naqaq gestates within
the empire’s reliance on the (ab)uses of biopower, and terrorizes by rendering
the human body for consumption and production in the service of another
embodied trope: scalability.
232
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Epilogue
Symerons, a black people who about eighty
years past fled from the cruelty of their
Masters the Spaniards, and grew since into a
Nation under two Kings of their own, one
inhabiting Westward, and the other East in
the way from Nombre de Dios to Panama.
-R.B. The English Hero (1692)
Over millenia, venture capital has been practiced under the guise of
different names: societas; commenda; triple contact; merchant capitalism, to
mention but a few. My approach to conquista has been contingent, all this
while, on an anachronistic term: venture capital. Privileging a term, “venture
capital,” because it name references the performative aspirations of its past
and future practitioners does, admittedly, approach the caricature of
Scholastic nominalism that Rabelais satirizes in the Gargantua. Yet the fact of
venture capital’s happy translation, all these years, so many names, so many
practitioners on a smaller or larger scale, points to the successes of a practice
that has performed its figurative and fictional tropes exceedingly well in
various cultural contexts. Alluding to White’s work on the tropes of writing
history, Genette claimed that the pretensions of metalepsis in historical
writing showed more audacity than the same trope used in fiction (13); after
all, nobody can truly control the past or the future. The metalepsis of venture
capital, in the performative texts and enterprises of conquista, laid claim to the
future in its gestation of legal fictions that haunt us to this day.
234
Yet one salient aspect of venture capital, in its original guise, has been
lost in translation. In chapter one, I argued that two exceptions to usury
allowed for the practice of venture capital enterprises on a larger scale in the
Indies. Sharing risks, to life and property, underwrote seafaring expeditions in
moral terms; the risks taken by partners in an enterprise could justify
extraordinary, unnatural, usufruct as the stakes were so high. These two
exceptions to usury and jus gentium were enough to drive a wedge between
use and property values. The conjunction between capitalism and
evangelization led material and spiritual wealth to be confounded, in concept
and in practice. Pursue your own interest, lovingly. Risk your life to win a
fortune: the labor from new Christians. The contradiction between caritas
and cupiditas, though never far from view, was submerged, in part, by the
immediacy of the exception in these ventures into inhabited terrae incognitae:
financial and labor partnerships and the imperatives of free trade and
evangelization.
As the biopolitics and bioeconomy of indigenous labor were scripted
into imperial institutions, unabashedly, the audacity of conquista’s metaleptic
habitus took on a new guise: the establishment of rules and protocols to limit
moral and material risk taking. What had justified, morally, the immoral and
unnatural pursuits of usury had become dispensable as a source for
legitimation after the fact. As argued in chapters two and three, the increasing
importance of love rhetoric emphasized indigenous consent in the law and
contracts of conquista, to the point that conquista itself became an outlawed
235
term in 1573. Yet the premises behind the economy of liberty and productivity,
as seen in Isabel of Castile’s instructions to Ovando in chapter three, did not
change with the 1573 ordenanzas.
My intention has not been to question the sincerity of the Sovereign’s
stuggles with her conscience. The stated goals of paz, amor and caridad in
relations with new indigenous subjects were all too real. Outlawing conquista,
paradoxically, was a sign of the empire’s heavy investment in the metaleptic
habitus that made conquista possible in the first place. Conquista was risky
business, descubrimiento perhaps less so, though the terms, as Gibson pointed
out, were largely synonymous.
Without risk to life, limb and property to support risky business (i.e.,
usury) as a common, moral demoninator, the metalepsis of venture capital
became self-perpetuating: its habitus was anti-risk. As the metalepsis of “love
interest” became the second nature to empire and its agents, risk and
unruliness were considered unnatural to the desired order. Thus, Fray Castro
and the encomenderos could propose their arguments for the perpetuity,
couched in concerns for risk, in all sincerity. They had to do their business
(with indigenous labor) with peace of mind; the risk of material losses (from
the loss of the encomienda) did not allow them to make the necessary
investments in indigenous wellbeing; risk, once integral to the metalepsis of
venture capital, was externalized,. However, risk continued to justify “love
interest,” but from without a legal tautology that relied, it declared,
unabashedly in 1573, on peace. In order to show our love to the indigenous
236
placed under our tutelage, the encomenderos and their allies in the Church,
argued, our interest must be ensured, in perpetuity.
How can one counter such arguments leveled, in all sincerity, when the
categories governing comportment have been confounded on such a grand
scale? The moral stakes in telling and retelling the recent past with a view to
the immediate future could not have been higher. In response, Las Casas told
and retold the prehispanic past and the conquista, from Africa to Goa to the
Spanish Indies, in order to remember and reiterate the real sacrifices made in
the name of legal fictions. What had been cast as an academic debate, was
recast by Las Casas and his followers as a dubium.
This doubt haunts José de Acosta even as he attempts to cast it aside
and promote cupiditas as a model for caritas. For Acosta, the relationship
between Christian love and empire is one of synecdoche, the part for the
whole. Yet power is refracted along the fault lines of investment that divy up
the proverbial pie. In his conceit for imperial power, Acosta leaves little actual
power for the Church that is fully subsumed into the Spanish or Portuguese
imperial projects. He also divests real power from Christian love; power, for
Acosta, as we have seen in the first and third chapters, exists in proportion to
capital investment. If one does indeed reap what one sows, as Acosta repeats,
tirelessly, his proposals for the liberation of the Indies’ barbarous peoples
would undermine his own authority as a member of the Church. The
contradictions inherent to the synonymous, metaleptic treatment of love
interest leads Acosta to upend the moral hierarchy of caritas and cupiditas in
237
favor of interest. Biopower expended in favor of cupiditas has born more fruit
than that spent on caritas. The utility of caritas qua caritas becomes Acosta’s
main source of doubt.
Determining the nature of the conquista, of its legal status, whether it
could be qualified as a Christian enterprise or not, were re-discovered as
matters of conscience. The confessional, the preferred means of conversion for
the Dominicans, via acceptance and consent of the neophyte, was used to
cultivate doubt in all participants of the conquista. The Avisos para confesores
in the Viceroyalty of Perú adjudicated complicity to anyone who received
material benefits, directly or indirectly, from the injuries made to the Indians.
Who would not be implicated after such a far reaching inquiry into the habitus
of the empire’s inhabitants? The extent of the devastation, according to Las
Casas, was impossible to remedy; the irreperable losses of conquista, which
had damaged the souls of so many of his countrymen, including that of the
Sovereign, had created an aporia from which Spain had no choice but to
retreat. Another prominent Dominican, Fray Francisco de la Cruz, would
attempt to resolve the contradictions of empire by recentering it with a new
political and spiritual seat in Lima. This program for reform remained beyond
his inquisitors’ scrutiny, even after his death at the stake, to qualify either as
madness or heresy. Can we infer from this opposition that heresy remains a
rational option, even when it goes against the law? Where does apostasy begin
and heresy end?
238
Who could make a claim to usufruct without the metalepsis of
conquista in the Indies? The doubts raised by fray Francisco de la Cruz and his
inquisitors (heresy or madness?) might allow us to imagine other similarly
incongruous oppositions: pirate or conquistador? Maroon or loyal subject?
Fact or Fiction? Or, rather, to rediscover situations, even “emergency
situations,” that allow us to recast those binaries for concepts that favor the
traditions of the oppressed.1 The tale of the maroons of Panama, and their
alliances with the dread pirate (and knight), Sir Francis Drake (d. 1596), in the
employ of Elizabeth Tudor, is a case in point. Narrated in episodes within Lope
de Vega’s epic, La Dragontea, the descriptions of the maroons, and their
actions, underscore the empire’s fraught relationship with insurgency, as
argued by Ranajit Guha in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, both to
document, rationalize and suppress. It also exemplifies the tenuous hold of
empires on the peoples and the material resources that fueled its hold on
power.
Francis Drake made an important alliance with the insurgents in and
around Nombre de Dios in the late 1560s.2 This alliance led to his military and
economic successes in Nombre de Dios and Cartagena in 1572. Notably, the
English apologists of Drake’s forays into Spanish “dominions” would
1
The call for a new concept of history was made by Walter Benjamin in his Eighth
thesis in his Theses on the Philosophy of History: The tradition of the oppressed
teaches us that the “ ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive
at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the
task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency” (257).
2 See both articles by Sánchez Jiménez for documents held by the Archivo General de
Indias that makes reference to these alliances.
239
emphasize the rights of the ex-slaves as a people with legitimate rulers. For
example, an English source for the episode, known only by his initials (R.B.),
emphasizes the heroics of the cimarrones and also their status as a nation in
his English Hero (1692): “Symerons, a black people who about eighty years
past fled from the cruelty of their Masters the Spaniards, and grew since into a
Nation under two Kings of their own, one inhabiting Westward, and the other
East in the way from Nombre de Dios to Panama" (emphasis in original, 6).
More than one hundred years after the maroons’ incorporation into the
Spanish empire, the possibilities for an English alliance with this Nation
remain open, narratively speaking, by ommitting Spain’s incorporation of the
latterday insurgents. Is the struggle for the recognition of a people’s rights
another form of consent to the imperial project? Is insurgency the only way
out? If so, how can we speak of insurgency without recurring to the figures and
fictions of the metalepsis of venture capital and its unrelenting pursuit of scale
and scalability?
Lope de Vega’s conflicting portrayals of the maroons of Panamá point to
the limits of form in defining what, by definition, exists out of bounds.
Fomented by Greed (Codicia) in the Dragontea, the maroons are motivated by
“treachery” and vengeance against their former masters. The epic narrative,
however, comes across a stumbling block in its characterization of the
insurgents: how to rationalize the subsequent turn of events. Following
Drake’s and the cimarrones’ victories in the Caribbean and Pacific coasts,
Spanish colonial officials set out to incorporate the ex-slaves into Spanish
240
dominion. By 1592, the cimarrones had been “reduced” and re-located to
Santiago del Príncipe to live “civilly” (con policía), and had accepted the
authority of the Spanish Crown and Church.
They proved their allegiance to the Spanish Crown by attacking Drake
upon his return to the coasts of Panamá in 1592, and Drake retaliated against
his former allies by burning down their town. By then, the cimarrones were no
longer cimarrones (by definition, insurgents) but Spanish subjects whose
kings, Diego and Pedro Yalonga, were accountable to Spanish officials in the
Audiencia of Panama. Paradoxically, becoming subjects of the Crown with its
recognition of local rites, customs and leadership (jus gentium) entailed, at the
same time, an abdication of their identity. Having disparaged the “treachery”
of the cimarrones of Panama in earlier cantos, Lope de Vega hailed their valor
against Drake by describing them as “almost European” (como si fueran
naturales de Europa) but also compared their prowess to Ottoman soldiers.
Once incorporated, the former insurgents are clothed with the mixed
metaphors of empire.
How might we qualify these partnerships for profitable violence that are
defined per se as outlawed but on which empire depends? Did the maroons
show a political consciousness without the law? What differentiates a pirate
from a conquistador? Or a band of outlaws from a Nation? What happens
when people, formerly reified as property, become insurgents? And from their
insurgency consent to be transformed into subjects? Grammatically, but also
politically, does insurgency exist at the interstices of the figural relation
241
between producer and produced in the metaleptic habitus of venture capital?
What are the traditions of insurgency? Can they be transformed into the forms
governed by the nomos? Or does the nomos require translation, per se?
242
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